Write-ahead log for OLTP

DesignMedium40 minOracle and Snowflake style

Your task

Design the write-ahead log for a single-node relational OLTP engine that must guarantee durability (committed transactions survive a crash) and atomicity (no torn writes), while sustaining 60k small transactions/sec with a commit-latency p99 under 5ms. The dataset is 500GB on NVMe; in-place page updates are used for the main heap/index. Describe the WAL record format, the commit protocol, how recovery works, and the main throughput trade-off.

It covers

  • Group commit
  • Fsync
  • Checkpointing