Nice article,

Just a small history.

Transaction logs being nescessary for transaction rollback and rollforward as defined by Codd & Date in the early 1970's have been part of RDBMS technology all along.

MS jumpstarted its position in the RDBMS marketspace by co-licensing and then co-opting the Sybase v4.2 DB engine back in the mid-1980's. Its roots are still evident today in the presence of the 'master' db. MS did this because at the time, Sybase was the technology leader in part because their implementation of db cache was 100% separate (raw disk partititions) from O/S cache. By putting the DB cache under DB control, data loss is reduced and performance maximized based on the DB and not the O/S requirements which are often at odds.

Yes, I have no life..