Re: Clustering, mirroriing, or replication?

I find 7.3 and 7.4 to be rock solid on dual processor servers of Intel P4 and Xeon running RH9 and
Xeon running Fedora Core 2.

My systems run heavy load for about 6 hours straight each night when it is syncing data with legacy
systems (disk io and cpu maxed out).

I don't use replication, just nightly dump and restore to backup server.

Indeed the only problems I have ever had turned out to be hardware, a bad motherboard.

Terry Fielder
Manager Software Development and Deployment
Great Gulf Homes / Ashton Woods Homes
terry(at)greatgulfhomes(dot)com
Fax: (416) 441-9085

> -----Original Message-----
> From: pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
> [mailto:pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org]On Behalf Of Lincoln Yeoh
> Sent: Friday, August 13, 2004 10:25 AM
> To: Jon Brisbin; Richard Huxton
> Cc: pgSQL General
> Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Clustering, mirroriing, or replication?
>
>
> Most replication systems add a fair amount of complexity. How
> reliable are
> current replication systems? Are they replication systems for
> performance
> or for reliability+availability?
>
> How much does it cost to make sure that the probability of
> both master and
> failover machines failing is lower or as low as the
> probability of the
> replication system failing? What would the impact be e.g. resulting
> downtime etc?
>
> I have seen some HA + load balancing firewall (not DB)
> systems which were
> hardly worth the hassle - seemed to have just about the same
> amount of
> downtime (if not more due to the added complexity and
> interactions with
> other stuff - e.g. buggy switches).
>
> Some people have made similar mutterings about some DB clustering
> solutions. Even if that's because they didn't do it right, it may be
> because it's difficult to do it right, and that's not good is
> it? Could
> just be a "feel good thing" that doesn't really add much to
> reliability for
> all the added effort and overhead.
>
> Does anyone know what's the most reliable platform postgresql
> can run on?
> With or without scheduled downtime?
>
> At 11:03 AM 8/12/2004 -0500, Jon Brisbin wrote:
> >One option is to have the POS software always write to a
> local database,
> >with that change getting replicated to all other active
> nodes. Another
> >option is to have a "master" database, with a failover as
> backup. Downside
> >here is that if both machines fail, then they are dead in
> the water. We
> >can't make money if the registers aren't operational.
> However, this is
> >similar to what happens now (which is why we want to change it.)
> >
> >Having mucked with postgres replication a little in the last
> couple of days,
> >I'm starting to wonder just how long it will take us to
> develop a good
> >replication mechanism. If one is already in place, I'd just
> like to use
> >that. Or at least learn from someone else trying to set up something
> >similar.
>
>
> ---------------------------(end of
> broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 9: the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index
> scan if your
> joining column's datatypes do not match
>