Berkeley DB Reference Guide: Flushing the database cache

Berkeley DB Reference Guide:
Access Methods

Flushing the database cache

The DB->sync method flushes all modified records from the database cache to disk.

It is important to understand that flushing cached information to disk only minimizes the window of opportunity for corrupted data, it does not eliminate the possibility.

While unlikely, it is possible for database corruption to happen if a system or application crash occurs while writing data to the database. To ensure that database corruption never occurs, applications must either:

Use transactions and logging with automatic recovery.
Use logging and application-specific recovery.
Edit a copy of the database, and, once all applications using the database have successfully called DB->close, use system operations (for example, the POSIX rename system call) to atomically replace the original database with the updated copy.