Paint me unimpressed. "eat my Data" was a way, way better and deeper presentation:<p><a href="http://www.oscon.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/3172" rel="nofollow">http://www.oscon.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/3172</a><p>Get the presentation here:
<a href="http://flamingspork.com/talks/2007/06/eat_my_data.odp" rel="nofollow">http://flamingspork.com/talks/2007/06/eat_my_data.odp</a>
This talk totally failed to properly discuss the issues of the various kinds of fsync, instead (it seems to me) just making a selection of vague comments. That is a shame, as really properly understanding file integrity is a really important issue, which is very easy to get very wrong.<p>When ext4 came out, I remember a large number of apps losing data, as the metadata and 'normal data' caches can get out of order, meaning that:<p>Write file B.
Rename B -> A.<p>Can result (after a crash) in A being empty, as the rename can occur before the contents of B are actually written.
Converted the Presentation PPTX to PDF for accessibility: <a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5137/pdf-link/What%20Every%20Data%20Programmer%20Needs%20to%20Know%20About%20Disks%20Presentation.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5137/pdf-link/What%20Every%20Data%20...</a>
Slide 6: "[Disk] throughput: 768 MB/sec on SATA 3" is misleading, consumer-grade rotating disks barely fill SATA 1 with ~70 MB/sec. SSD are faster in raw transfer, and if you have a RAID you are not limited by a single SATA channel any more.<p>Slide 13: "Laugh at MongoDB" is pretty stupid, mongo makes certain trade-offs that are not for everyone, but they are still meaningful.<p>The presentation doesn't explore the RAID options, which is a shame.