Re: Best practices for cloning DB servers

Why don't you try using Barman? It allows you to take snapshots and do
PITR. Not to mention you can use it as it's intended purpose as a backup
engine.

-Joseph

On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Bill Mitchell <bill(at)publicrelay(dot)com> wrote:

> We are running our own Postgres server on AWS as well (since amazon RDS
> doesn't support read replicas yet)
>
> In out case, simply having a streaming replication standby works - and we
> do our pg_dump from that -- or simply snapshot the machine and then promote
> the replica to master to use full data set in QA
>
> I would have thought that shipping WAL file into S3 would have been
> problematic - I'd be interested in the size of the data set and the
> experiences you've had with that
>
>
> Regards
> Bill
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Aug 14, 2014, at 12:17, "Andy Lau" <alau(at)infer(dot)com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I had a question about some best practices. Our situation is that we
> want to be able to clone a database server. Our single database server is
> hosted in AWS, we take EBS snapshots every so often, and upload our WAL
> logs to S3. We want to be able to start a new server from a snapshot,
> replay the WAL logs to get to a specific point in time, then start using
> the database from there. The problem we ran into here was that this exact
> clone started uploading WAL logs to our S3 archive, mixing them up with the
> original WAL logs. Since this is effectively a branch off of the original
> DB, mixing up the logs is very bad. A solution here could be to just point
> clones to a different location in S3 so they won't collide, but I was
> wondering if there were any best practices for doing this.
> >
> > Also would appreciate any advice on cloning DB servers in general. A few
> of our use cases include restoring to a previous good DB to experiment
> while keeping the production DB unaffected, and testing Postgres version
> upgrades (9.1 to 9.3).
> >
> > Thanks!
> > -Andy
>
>
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