btree-durability-protects-data-not-structure

Status: OUT

The B-tree's durability model protects user data but not structural integrity: mutations pay double fsync for data pages (WAL entry + data write) while structural metadata is never fsynced, AND structural integrity silently erodes during normal operation (leaked pages, ever-growing height, dangling parent pointers after free_page) with no defensive checks in the I/O layer to detect or prevent degradation.

Justifications

Fsync asymmetry protects the values but not the tree shape, while the tree shape degrades monotonically — durability effort is precisely misallocated

Depends on (SL): btree-structural-integrity-silently-erodes, btree-mutation-fsync-is-asymmetric

Depended on by

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