> This may be totally irrelevant:
>
> Our current load distributors, like pgpool, have no way of knowing the
> side effects of backend functions. It would be interesting if the
> client could send each potential query to the master saying, "execute
> this query if there are side effects, otherwise do no operation and
> and let me execute this read-only query on a replicated copy."
You can go 'SET TRANSACTION READ ONLY;' or something...
Chris