A lot of DBAs are quite adamant regarding ACID compliance. I count myself among them. But unlike the other parts of the acronym, there are times when data durability isn’t actually a high priority. Data staging holding areas, temporary tables that need visibility across sessions, and other transient information do not require zealous protection. As a DBA it feels weird saying it, but there’s just some data we simply don’t care about losing.
Last week, I covered how MVCC, Postgres’s storage system, works on a very high level. Near the end, I also mentioned that it doesn’t quite lend itself well to certain use cases, such as rapidly mutating session storage. Well, there is one caveat to that statement that I’d forgotten about because of its relatively limited utility: unlogged tables.
Here’s what the Postgres documentation has to say about unlogged tables:
Data written to unlogged tables is not written to the write-ahead log, which makes them considerably faster than ordinary tables.
