> > Cons:
> - No reliability. On slow days, WAL logs could take a long time to
> rotate, so small but important transactions might not be replicated
> for a long time.
That's gone with 8.2, it will be possible to stream the last
modifications, or force a WAL recycle periodically, whatever fits you
better. There is some new infrastructure which allows these things,
although I didn't have the time to play with them.
The big improvement would be indeed to have the infrastructure to start
up a standby by simply pointing it to the master server, no other setup
needed. Implement that, make it reliable, and any beginner to postgres
will be able to easily set up a WAL shipping based standby. Right now
you still have to do some complicated scripting to make it work (no idea
how much 8.2 will help here, didn't try yet).
Cheers,
Csaba.
