FAQ: Current state of replication ?

Been reading
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/pgsql/doc/TODO.detail/replication with
interest as we are now approaching a real requirement for it on a project we
have finally resurrected for a bit of a dormant state.

What is the current state-of-the-art WRT replication of any sort ? If anyone
has homebrew solutions that they can share, we would welcome tyring too.

Our requirements, which seem sort of reasonable, are:

1. One "writer", many "reader" PostgreSQL servers. We will want to write
provisioning / configuration information centrally and can tolerate a
"writer" failuer for a time.
2. Consitency at the transaction level. All changes to the "writer" server
will be wrapped in transactions, and there will be foreign key consistency
checking in many tables.
3. Delays from "writer" through to consistent state on "readers" can be
tolerated to within a few minutes or even more. All read-servers must be in
the same state when answering requests.

Our objective is to acheive performance and some fault tolerance as the data
is going to be used for near-real time configuration of various other
backend systems in an almost traditional 'net environment.

As we are coding various other stuff for this project over the next few
months, any help we can be in developing for this part of PostgreSQL, just
let me know. While knowing very little about PostgreSQL internals, we learn
quick.

rgds,
--
Peter Galbavy
Knowledge Matters Ltd.
http://www.knowledge.com/