ENH: HDFStore.flush() to optionally perform fsync (GH5364)

doc/source/io.rst

@@ -2745,6 +2745,9 @@ Notes & Caveats
      need to serialize these operations in a single thread in a single
      process. You will corrupt your data otherwise. See the issue
      (:`2397`) for more information.
+   - If you use locks to manage write access between multiple processes, you
+     may want to use :py:func:`~os.fsync` before releasing write locks. For
+     convenience you can use ``store.flush(fsync=True)`` to do this for you.
    - ``PyTables`` only supports fixed-width string columns in
      ``tables``. The sizes of a string based indexing column
      (e.g. *columns* or *minor_axis*) are determined as the maximum size

doc/source/release.rst

@@ -275,6 +275,8 @@ API Changes
     - store `datetime.date` objects as ordinals rather then timetuples to avoid
       timezone issues (:issue:`2852`), thanks @tavistmorph and @numpand
     - ``numexpr`` 2.2.2 fixes incompatiblity in PyTables 2.4 (:issue:`4908`)
+    - ``flush`` now accepts an ``fsync`` parameter, which defaults to ``False``
+      (:issue:`5364`)
   - ``JSON``
 
     - added ``date_unit`` parameter to specify resolution of timestamps.

pandas/io/pytables.py

@@ -10,6 +10,7 @@
 import copy
 import itertools
 import warnings
+import os
 
 import numpy as np
 from pandas import (Series, TimeSeries, DataFrame, Panel, Panel4D, Index,
@@ -525,12 +526,26 @@ def is_open(self):
             return False
         return bool(self._handle.isopen)
 
-    def flush(self):
+    def flush(self, fsync=False):
         """
-        Force all buffered modifications to be written to disk
+        Force all buffered modifications to be written to disk.
+
+        Parameters
+        ----------
+        fsync : bool (default False)
+          call ``os.fsync()`` on the file handle to force writing to disk.
+
+        Notes
+        -----
+        Without ``fsync=True``, flushing may not guarantee that the OS writes
+        to disk. With fsync, the operation will block until the OS claims the
+        file has been written; however, other caching layers may still
+        interfere.
         """
         if self._handle is not None:
             self._handle.flush()
+            if fsync:
+                os.fsync(self._handle.fileno())
 
     def get(self, key):
         """
@@ -4072,5 +4087,4 @@ def timeit(key, df, fn=None, remove=True, **kwargs):
     store.close()
 
     if remove:
-        import os
         os.remove(fn)

pandas/io/tests/test_pytables.py

@@ -465,6 +465,7 @@ def test_flush(self):
         with ensure_clean(self.path) as store:
             store['a'] = tm.makeTimeSeries()
             store.flush()
+            store.flush(fsync=True)
 
     def test_get(self):