Thread: two cents

Reading the 20 or so Re's to NFS issues as well as the last few months of
list watching, as well as my own crash experience etc, what is the current
direction/state of things regarding backup, replication etc with postgresql?
Do you foresee pg_dump being used in the long term?  It is sounding like
people are screaming for an automated, reliable way/state for shifting data
out of the database.  Or a "hot copy" function.

Storage providers out there (storageway, storage networks, etc) are beating
their heads working with terabyte backups of oracle monsters and finding
ingenious ways to shunt these systems off to permanent storage while they're
running full speed.  Veritas has a whole slew of approaches to backing up
these running monsters.

Not that postgresql would become the maven and apple of the storage
provider's eye ... but ...

I've yet to figure out a reliable automation backing up my hot postgresql
which doesn't involve *me* alert & oriented x 4.

Thanks,
George Johnson

George Johnson writes:

> Reading the 20 or so Re's to NFS issues as well as the last few months of
> list watching, as well as my own crash experience etc, what is the current
> direction/state of things regarding backup, replication etc with postgresql?
> Do you foresee pg_dump being used in the long term?  It is sounding like
> people are screaming for an automated, reliable way/state for shifting data
> out of the database.  Or a "hot copy" function.

Backup will probably stay pg_dump's domain indefinitely.  It has a "hot
copy"/snapshot/consistent dump capability, it can be automated, and we'd
like to think that 7.1's incarnation is a lot more reliable, too.

Eventually, maybe even in the 7.2 release, WAL based backups will be
available as well.

Replication is available at www.erserver.com.  A stripped
down/introductory version (so I understand) is in contrib/rserv in 7.1.

--
Peter Eisentraut      peter_e@gmx.net       http://yi.org/peter-e/