underlying hardware and in particular power systems can impact durability of relational databases. According to the H2 documentation, such problems are related not only to the DB engine design, but also to the storage caching mechanism. As storage devices use write cache in order to increase speed, in a situation of power failure, data in the device's cache is lost. Administrators have then to assess the common trade off between speed and data loss risks in the context of the business requirements and must carefully consider the design of the power supply and UPS of critical servers. It is possible in some cases to force the storage to write cache frequently or even immediately using fsync which slows the writing process or one can accept that caching in the device buffer introduces some risk of data loss in case of power failure. The effectiveness of using fsync is limited by the fact that many HDD have write caching enabled by factory default in which case there is nothing about the design or settings of the database nor OS level commands that will be able to eliminate the chance of lost or inconsistent data in the event of a sudden power failure. Working with the OS and hardware settings to disable all caching so as to write data in real time can have significant impacts on performance in that only around 100 write operations per second would be achievable when using spinning disks. The H2 documentation makes an effort to describe in detail potential problems with durability (part of ACID) resulting from the potential data loss of committed transactions in case of a power failure. Considering the hardware limitations regarding preservation of data in the event of sudden power loss and the ineffectiveness of approaches commonly employed by developers to prevent these sorts of losses, many database engines do not by default call FileDescriptor.sync() nor FileChannel.force() nor fsync or equivalents for every commit because they significantly degrade system performance without significantly increasing durability. HSQLDB documentation references workarounds to a similar set of issues in their documentation. The Microsoft Knowledge Base describes the impact these issues, power failures, write caching, etc. can have on performance and durability. The knowledge base discusses the trade offs between performance and the vulnerability of disk write caching as well as settings that an administrator can use to balance these. Utilities An embedded web server with a