There’s a “canonical” pointer to the root node which is updated atomically on every append. For an in-memory database, a CAS is adequate. Persistent stores ul

There’s a “canonical” pointer to the root node which is updated atomically on every append. For an in-memory database, a CAS is adequate. Persistent stores ultimately need some kind of file-level locking. If you look at the Apache Iceberg spec, you get a good idea of how this works: The only “mutability” in that universe is the root table pointer in the catalog.