Allowed DML on replicas?

Hi!

I'm getting ready to build a reporting server, one where long-running queries and backups will be taken from. This new server will be a slave from the master where all changes are done. Some reports are better expressed with extracting a subset of the data and leaving it in a table to be reused, until the report set is done.

In my specific case, I have a table with ~30M rows representing Twitter users. When I JOIN this table with the interactions I have on hand, it takes a long time, because PostgreSQL ends up doing a full table scan of the personas table. To make subsequent reporting steps easier, I do the JOIN only once, and write the results to a table.

My question is:

* Can a new schema be created on a replica?
* Will this impact replication in any way?
* If I can't, what would you advise? dump / reload in a separate database without dropping the table, to keep the extra schemas around?

Thanks!
François Beausoleil