Mar 17, 2024

The store implementation is now fault tolerant (can recover from hardware failures) and available (does not need to be stopped or queries paused to provide fault tolerance), but also provides an assurance that other database-based systems cannot. Absent undetected hardware malfunction, the store is reliable. This is not the case with other database systems, there is no such assurance that a hard shutdown will not result in data corruption. In our case we always detect if there is a hard shutdown, and can always recover to a snapshot with perfect data integrity and low cost. Other systems have no way to know a fault has occurred, which is why Core for a long time has scanned recent blocks at startup (though a failure can occur anywhere).