The first major benefit of using WAL is a
significantly reduced number of disk writes, because only the log
file needs to be flushed to disk at the time of transaction
commit, rather than every data file changed by the transaction.
In multiuser environments, commits of many transactions
may be accomplished with a single fsync
of
the log file. Furthermore, the log file is written sequentially,
and so the cost of syncing the log is much less than the cost of
flushing the data pages. This is especially true for servers
handling many small transactions touching different parts of the data
store.
The next benefit is consistency of the data pages. The truth is that, before WAL, PostgreSQL was never able to guarantee consistency in the case of a crash. Before WAL, any crash during writing could result in:
Problems with indexes (problems 1 and 2) could possibly have been
fixed by additional fsync
calls, but it is
not obvious how to handle the last case without
WAL. WAL saves the entire data
page content in the log if that is required to ensure page
consistency for after-crash recovery.
Finally, WAL makes it possible to support on-line backup and point-in-time recovery, as described in Section 23.3, “On-line backup and point-in-time recovery (PITR)”. By archiving the WAL data we can support reverting to any time instant covered by the available WAL data: we simply install a prior physical backup of the database, and replay the WAL log just as far as the desired time. What's more, the physical backup doesn't have to be an instantaneous snapshot of the database state [mdash ] if it is made over some period of time, then replaying the WAL log for that period will fix any internal inconsistencies.