Why Voron has a Write Ahead Journal, not a Write Ahead Log

time to read 1 min | 94 words

Most of the database literature talks about Write Ahead Log, or WAL for short.  Voron uses a Write Ahead Journal. And the reason isn’t technical. The reason is human.

I can’t tell you just how many times I have had to deal with people who send me the RavenDB transaction logs instead of the debug log.

Calling what Voron is doing a Journal means that we have a very clear separation between the things we do to keep the data, and the things we output to inform the user what is actually going on.