"Brendan Jurd" <direvus(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> So, my question for the list is: is Slony + log shipping the direction
> I should be investigating, or is there something else out that I ought
> to consider?
Those are two different methods: you'd use one or the other, not both.
Slony-I is much the more battle-tested of the two at the moment. In
theory WAL log shipping should be higher performance for heavy-update
scenarios, but its latency is variable (low update rate = higher
latency), and not easy to put a bound on pre-8.2.
Have you looked at the replication info recently added to the PG docs?
http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/failover.html
regards, tom lane