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by i_k_k 236 days ago
I always wanted to ship a write-only database. Lightning fast.
3 comments

Back in the 80s a professor at our college got a presentation on the concept of «write-only memory» accepted for some symposium.

Good times.

Very secure!
Pretty much how eventstoredb works. Deleting data fully only happens at scavenge which rewrites the data files.
I think it was a joke. It sounds like you read it as append-only, like most LSM tree databases (not rewriting files in the course of write operations), but I think GP meant it as write-only to the exclusion of reads, roughly equivalent to `echo $data > /dev/null`
I've forgotten how to count that low. [0]

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI

That would be useful for logging.
If it's write-only, and no reads ever happen, one can write to /dev/null without loss of utility.
It would be good for before going to sleep then.
Also useful for backups, so long as you don't need to restore.