Previous Next JavaScript must be enabled to correctly display this content

## 12 Durability Guarantees

Writes are performed in the Oracle NoSQL Database store by performing the write operation (be it a creation, update, or delete operation) on a master node. As a part of performing the write operation, the master node will usually make sure that the operation has made it to stable storage before considering the operation complete.

The master node will also transmit the write operation to the replica nodes in its shard. It is possible to ask the master node to wait for acknowledgments from its replicas before considering the operation complete.

Note:

If your store is configured such that secondary zones are in use, then write acknowledgements are never required for the replicas in the secondary zones. That is, write acknowledgements are only returned by replicas in primary zones. For more information on zones, see Administrator's Guide.

The replicas, in turn, will not acknowledge the write operation until they have applied the operation to their own database.

A durability guarantee, then, is a policy which describes how strongly persistent your data is in the event of some kind of catastrophic failure within the store. (Examples of a catastrophic failure are power outages, disk crashes, physical memory corruption, or even fatal application programming errors.)

A high durability guarantee means that there is a very high probability that the write operation will be retained in the event of a catastrophic failure. A low durability guarantee means that the write is very unlikely to be retained in the event of a catastrophic failure.

The higher your durability guarantee, the slower your write-throughput will be in the store. This is because a high durability guarantee requires a great deal of disk and network activity.

Usually you want some kind of a durability guarantee, although if you have highly transient data that changes from run-time to run-time, you might want the lowest possible durability guarantee for that data.

Durability guarantees include two types of information: acknowledgment guarantees and synchronization guarantees. These two types of guarantees are described in the next sections. We then show how to set a durability guarantee.

Note that by default, Oracle NoSQL Database uses a low durability guarantee.