A no-force policy is used in transaction control in database theory

Database theory

Database theory encapsulates a broad range of topics related to the study and research of the theoretical realm of databases and database management systems....

. The term no-force refers to the disk pages related to the actual database object being modified.

With a no-force policy, when a transaction

Database transaction

A transaction comprises a unit of work performed within a database management system against a database, and treated in a coherent and reliable way independent of other transactions...

 commits, the changes made to the actual objects are not required to be written to disk in-place (forced).

A record of the changes must still be preserved at commit time to ensure that the transaction is durable

Durability (computer science)

In database systems, durability is the ACID property which guarantees that transactions that have committed will survive permanently.For example, if a flight booking reports that a seat has successfully been booked, then the seat will remain booked even if the system crashes.Durability can be...

. This record is typically written to a sequential transaction log

Transaction log

In the field of databases in computer science, a transaction log is a history of actions executed by a database management system to guarantee ACID properties over crashes or hardware failures...

, with the actual changes to the database objects being changes which can be written at a later time.

For frequently changed objects, a no-force policy allows updates to be merged and so reduce the number of write operations to the actual database object. A no-force policy also reduces the seek time required for a commit by having mostly sequential write operations to the transaction log, rather than requiring the disk to seek to many distinct database objects during a commit.