Write buffer

I only talked about read buffers that load data before using them. But in a database you also have write buffers that store data and flush them on disk by bunches instead of writing data one by one and producing many single disk accesses.

Keep in mind that buffers store pages (the smallest unit of data) and not rows (which is a logical/human way to see data). A page in a buffer pool is dirty if the page has been modified and not written on disk. There are multiple algorithms to decide the best time to write the dirty pages on disk but it’s highly linked to the notion of transaction, which is the next part of the article.