Final answer:
The process of writing any portion of the log that has not been written to disk before reaching the commit point of a transaction is known as 'force-writing the log' or 'flushing the log to disk'. This is a critical step in maintaining the ACID properties of a database.
Step-by-step explanation:
Before a transaction reaches its commit point, any portion of the log that has not been written to the disk yet must now be written to the disk. This process is called force-writing the log or to flush the log to disk before committing a transaction. It's an essential step in the write-ahead logging protocol, which ensures that any changes made by the transaction can be recovered in the case of a system failure. By force-writing the log records to the disk, the database maintains the Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) properties which are critical to transaction processing systems.