Seeking advice on database replication.

Hello,

I am interested in sharing/replicating data between different databases, and I'd like to ask if what I'd like to do is possible in postgresql. I have read a fair amount of documentation and was looking forward to PostgreSQL 9, but I don't think it will do for me what I want.

I have an astronomical database at one site, let's call it A. At my own institution (across the country), I have another database, B. I want to replicate all of the tables of A into a read-only copy in B, in as close to real-time as possible. The time isn't a critical factor here - if it's delayed by even an hour, I'm ok with that. Tables in B will need to JOIN against tables from A. The total size of A is ~80MB and grows slowly.

After reading the documentation for PG9's replication, it seems I cannot do this since it only supports replicating a cluster. It appears that I'd want to put the tables in B into one schema, the tables from A into another schema in the same database (let's call it B.a), and replicate the tables from A into B.a. Is this at all possible? This promises to be a very powerful tool for us, but I don't know how best to accomplish this.

Further, I'd like A to be replicated to several institutions. Again, this is not a real-time operation, but something that doesn't require user intervention is ideal.

I tried to run Slony-I last year, but found it to be very frustrating and never got it to work. (In retrospect, I don't even know if it supports schema-level replication).

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers,
Demitri

Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics
New York University