I feel like you're banking a little too heavily on external measures for error protection/durability like UPSes and ECC memory, rather than embracing the inevitable fact that corruption and failures will occur. In short, I'd really need to see a white paper on why you're not reinventing the wheel before I'd use InifiSQL.
Kudos for engaging the community though; please do keep us posted as you progress.
Actually, there's precious little that an application can do if a memory chip fails, or if ECC gets too many corrupted bits. If it gets too many corrupted bits, the kernel will generally do something like halt the system. I am not familiar with any application which does a write-read-write (or similar) to memory, but would be curious to learn about them. I'm sure such an algorithm can also be used in InfiniSQL.
I am familiar with applications such as IBM WebSphere MQ which does a triple-write to disk for every transaction, to overcome corruption problems. But even IBM will recommend turning that parameter off for performance reasons if the storage layer performs that kind of verification, such as HDS or EMC arrays. So, if an InfiniSQL user wants that level of storage protection, they can buy it.
Regarding InfiniSQL's planned use of UPS systems, that's pretty much the identical design to how the above-mentioned storage arrays protect block storage from power loss. I'm just moving the protection up to the application level.
Thanks for the conversation and thoughtful comments. Please go to http://www.infinisql.org/community/ and find the project on Twitter, sign up for newsletter, hit me on LinkedIn.
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Hi, yid. For some reason I can't reply to your last comment. I think I didn't explain things well enough--I do plan to implement synchronous replication to protect against single replica failure. I describe the plan somewhat in http://www.infinisql.org/docs/overview/
Much of the code for the replication is in place (and it actually worked a few thousand lines of code ago) but it's currently not functional.
I have a big backlog to work on, but n-way synchronous replication is definitely in there.
Kudos for engaging the community though; please do keep us posted as you progress.