Re: Core team statement on replication in PostgreSQL

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 09:54:03PM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> David Fetter wrote:
> > Either one of these would be great, but something that involves
> > machines that stay useless most of the time is just not going to
> > work.
>
> Lots of people do use warm standby already anyway, just not based on
> mechanisms built into PostgreSQL. So defining away this need is
> completely unrealistic based on my experience. Even if there were a
> read-only slave, lots of applications couldn't make use of it.
>
> Anyway, a common approach to making better use of the hardware is to
> put some other service on the otherwise-standby machine, which in
> turn uses your master database server machine as its failover
> target. Unless you run *only* a database, there would usually be
> some candidate that you could set up that way.
>
> Another common approach is to realize that for some the costs of a
> downtime risk are higher than buying some extra hardware.

> I think the consensus in the core team was that having synchronous
> log shipping in 8.4 would already be a worthwhile feature by itself.

If that was in fact the consensus of the core team, and what I've been
seeing from several core members in this thread makes that idea
unclear, it's out of step with the stated goal of the feature. Having
some kind of half-way, doesn't-actually-quite-work-out-of-the-box
"replication" will make things worse and not better.

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter
Skype: davidfetter XMPP: david(dot)fetter(at)gmail(dot)com

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