What Actually Happens When You Call INSERT?

You call INSERT. The database says OK. You move on. That acknowledgment feels instant. It feels cheap. It feels like the database just... wrote something down. But between your INSERT and that OK, at minimum four distinct things happened that most engineers who use databases every day have never thought about: The write was recorded in a sequential log before it touched any data structure — so a crash wouldn't lose it At least one index was updated — and that update is more expensive than the in