Persistence

To ensure data persistence, Tarantool records updates to the database in the so-called write-ahead log (WAL) files. When a power outage occurs or the Tarantool instance is killed incidentally, the in-memory database is lost. In such case, Tarantool restores the data from WAL files by reading them and redoing the requests. This is called the “recovery process”. You can change the timing of the WAL writer or turn it off by setting the wal_mode.

Tarantool also maintains a set of snapshot files. These files contain an on-disk copy of the entire data set for a given moment. Instead of reading every WAL file since the databases were created, the recovery process can load the latest snapshot file and then read the WAL files, produced after the snapshot file was made. After creating a new snapshot, the earlier WAL files can be removed to free up space.

To force immediate creation of a snapshot file, use the box.snapshot() function. To enable the automatic creation of snapshot files, use Tarantool’s checkpoint daemon. The checkpoint daemon sets intervals for forced checkpoints. It makes sure that the states of both memtx and vinyl storage engines are synchronized and saved to disk, and automatically removes earlier WAL files.

Snapshot files can be created even if there is no WAL file.

See the Internals section for more details about the WAL writer and the recovery process.