Re: FAQ: Current state of replication ?

> 1. One "writer", many "reader" PostgreSQL servers. We will want to write
> provisioning / configuration information centrally and can tolerate a
> "writer" failuer for a time.
> 2. Consitency at the transaction level. All changes to the "writer" server
> will be wrapped in transactions, and there will be foreign key consistency
> checking in many tables.
> 3. Delays from "writer" through to consistent state on "readers" can be
> tolerated to within a few minutes or even more. All read-servers must be
in
> the same state when answering requests.
>
> Our objective is to acheive performance and some fault tolerance as the
data
> is going to be used for near-real time configuration of various other
> backend systems in an almost traditional 'net environment.
>
> As we are coding various other stuff for this project over the next few
> months, any help we can be in developing for this part of PostgreSQL, just
> let me know. While knowing very little about PostgreSQL internals, we
learn
> quick.

Peter,

I've been mostly a lurker here (at least on the hackers list) for a couple
of years, but I thought I would "de-lurk" for long enough to reply to your
question ;)

Attached is the source for a replication solution I recently wrote for a
project I'm working on. I think it meets your criteria. I was considering
sending it to the list as a possible contrib after 7.1 was released (if
anyone is interested, and the code is worthy), but since you asked, here it
is. A few disclaimers are in order. First, I am *not* an experienced C
programmer. The code works in the limited testing I've done so far but needs
to be reviewed and scrubbed by someone with more experience. Second, I have
not yet used this in production, so use at your own risk. Third, I have only
tested it under Red Hat 6.2 and 7.0. Finally, it will only work with >=
PostgreSQL 7.1 beta3.

Basic installation instructions:
copy pg_lnk.tgz to contrib under the PostgreSQL source tree
tar -xzvf pg_lnk.tgz
cd pg_lnk
./install.sh

I'll be happy to answer any questions to help you get it installed and
working. I would appreciate any feedback, improvements, general guidance if
you decide to use it.

Thanks,

Joe

<lurking once again . . .>