mmap does complicate things. A traditional database often works using write ahead logs. The log holds changes made to the database over time - so when you wan

mmap does complicate things. A traditional database often works using write ahead logs. The log holds changes made to the database over time - so when you want to write a change to your DB, you put 'I'm changing value x.y to 50' in your WAL. Sometime later the actual data pages holding the modified x data structure can be written out to disk. If you have a crash before the data pages get written out, you can 'replay' your WAL file to redo all the lost changes. Unfortunately, a central requirement of a write ahead log is that the data pages must not get written before the WAL. If that were to occur, and there were a crash, the system wouldn't know that it had to undo the changes to the data pages, leaving you with corrupt data. mmap generally doesn't provide the ability to pin your dirty pages in memory - they're subject to getting flushed any time the system is under memory pressure - so it makes logging a lot more complicated to get right.