Oracle, MSSQL and some rarer ones (Actian Zen?) are "VSS-Aware" in that they register a writer driver. This gives them a callback before the snapshot starts - a chance to flush transactions and hold off writing any more, for a second or two until the disk snapshot is created and block tracking has begun. Then they get a second callback saying they can resume.

More interesting is e.g. Hyper-V using this to snapshot the guest VMs.

It just takes you one step beyond being only crash-consistent, so that everything is actually application-consistent.

Implementing a VSS writer is a big 90's-style COM interface, but there is also a lightweight alternative model on top of that that eludes my search right now.

Red Hat has some similar convention for freeze/thaw scripts that can make API calls to the DB to ask it to do the same thing.

> "More interesting is e.g. Hyper-V using this to snapshot the guest VMs."

It can run through VMware tools into virtual machines, too, and down a layer to SAN storage and trigger a SAN snapshot so that a backup system like Veeam can take data from the SAN while knowing the guests two levels higher flushed data before the snapshot was taken.

or e.g. here Nimble SAN can talk up to servers through VSS to trigger SQL Server quiesce before they take a SAN snapshot: https://infosight.hpe.com/InfoSight/media/cms/active/public/...

Does it just buffer to memory during this, or do the databases block writes?

It just needs to listen to explicit fsync commands and choose a matching point-in-time. Beyond that, no, it's not hard as a database to tell the OS about moments where a block-level disk image would not need repairing, after the OS asks you.

I assume this is to prevent situations that would need time-intensive WAL-replay or such, and there it'd only be opportunistic with the "sudden power loss" recovery as a fall-back path.

Postgres supports backing up by just copying its files if you let it know using pg_start_backup/pg_stop_backup.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/backup-online.html

These database already have to make sure that they can recover from the system crashing. So it is probably only incrementally more work to add a feature to write out some extra metadata to enable these sorts of online backups.

AIUI, Postgres rotates its WAL, so once something is acknowledged as having hit the storage, the WAL entry referring to that write can be thrown away and that WAL space can be re-used. When you do pg_start_backup, it just temporarily stops throwing away old WAL entries, so that the copy of all the files you make elsewhere is guaranteed to have all the WAL entries it needs to make the database fully consistent.