But Roon has one of the more robust backup system I’ve ever seen in a consumer product… and they do tell you to turn it on. I don’t know how you’d avoid that kind of potential corruption; they could maybe make backups more automated (eg, more frequent local backups that automatically are grabbed at first sign of corruption, in addition to manually configured remote, warnings about backup status, more cloud options, …). However I think the use case is one which it would be hard to guard against potential corruption. Most other in-home consumer applications (eg, Quickbooks, trying to think of others) are not as write intensive. Maybe they could segment out play frequency from metadata, which would mean very infrequent writes to metadata, which is what most of us really care more about; but I don’t know what the performance implications would be.
Any robust data base product takes critical checkpoints and can determine when incomplete changes (which is mostly the problem with unexpected power outages) have occurred and consequently back off to the last good (I.e. complete) data base operation.
That capability is part of a DB’s charter.
If only that were true. Roon’s Backup has its own set of problems.
Sorry - I think that we’re confusing enterprise db products run in production environments, with what can run on the same machine running the core. I don’t think (and I’m not a data tech person, so please educate me if I’m wrong). I don’t think that there are products with the features that you describe that can (even in theory) run locally and without support. Like you could run MySQL, but you couldn’t actually implement resiliency etc in a totally passive consumer environment, could you? I’ve only worked in enterprise data center/cloud/hybrid production environments, so maybe I’m totally wrong here.
It’s funny, I have the opposite instinct; I wonder why this isn’t like the razor blade example; sell the handle and the trial pack of blades cheap (perhaps even at a loss) but it’s worthless without the blades on an ongoing basis. Similarly with the Nucleus / ROCK; give ‘em away cheap but they are doorstops without the service.
I wonder how much of their user base is professional Audio installers (for whom a device like the nucleus makes all the sense in the world) vs diy’ers. I think we on this board skew somewhat toward DIY’ers, but there are an awful lot of folks whose installers just drop another $1500 item in the rack for home automation etc.
Yes, I’ve seen quite a few posts to that effect. Not sure I’d say an inordinate amount, but the problem does exist. That said, I’m still not convinced that a 2014 article regarding LevelDB and power failures on older file systems is sufficient to explain these issues.
The fact that the database gets corrupted so often, points to an inadequate DB solution.
Whatever, I’m thru here. 
So many experts.
What do you mean ‘we’re’ confused? Do you have a mouse in your pocket?
There are DBs that are scaled to any implementation. At the very worst, the checkpoint calls need to be initiated by the app’s code, but the capability is still present.
No opinion on this, but I will say that among the handful of problems I’ve had with roon over the past couple of years, database corruption has not been one of them.
Sorry, that sounded passive aggressive on my part. I guess I should have said something more like: “now I’m getting confused, because I think something different but I’m not in my domain so here’s what I think you’re confused about but it easily could be me”.
Internet protocol reminder for me to reread. Have a good thanksgiving (assuming you’re in the US)!
I have also worked in the IT world for over 40 years with the last 30+ years as a database engineer/DBA. Leveldb is not new and when I did some comparisons between leveldb and its competitors, rocksdb from Facebook was much better. Rocksdb has also created a DB engine for MySQL that replaces innodb.
I have used various key-value db’s along with 30+ years in the relational db world and why would you ever consider a key-value db for such a small db like Roon. Relational db’s is what the world uses, more support, and uses less space and because of indexing schemes can be much faster for small queries.
As for open source, you get what you pay for. I love Linux and MySQL, but I didn’t use either in production until support was provided by large companies. Can you imagine running payroll on a tainted linux kernel that only your sys admin knows his patch that he installed?
I agree. My last company developed an entertainment website (www.fandom.com) that has 300m monthly users and used tons of open source software. The age of believing all open source software is bad, low quality or risky from a business perspective has long passed. You of course have to make good decisions in what you use.
Any relevant open source software all has commercial support contracts. The idea that open source is bad quality because it doesn’t have support is irrelevant. Whomever started with this Fortune 500 rubbish is not with the times. Even the off the shelf commercial products contain large open source components now - yes, even Microsoft Windows.