It only suffers from one problem: if the database crashes, the most recent writes (which are in the memtable but not yet written out to disk) are lost. In order to avoid that problem, we can keep a separate log on disk to which every write is immediately appended, just like in the previous section. That log is not in sorted order, but that doesn’t matter, because its only purpose is to restore the memtable after a crash. Every time the memtable is written out to an SSTable, the corresponding log can be discarded.
