Re: Postgres High Availablity Solution needed for hot-standby and load balancing

On 30.11.2007, at 02:34, Usama Dar wrote:

> Have you looked at pgCluster

I project where the "latest news" page shows the newest entry from
March 2005 and the install talks only about PostgreSQL 8.0 isn't
really inspiring confidence ...

Continuent is very active, but it limits the servers to Linux, it
seems it doesn't work on BSD or Mac OS X. At least, these are not
listed on the product page for uni/cluster.

The lack of an integrated multi master clustering solution in
PostgreSQL is the only real downside I can see. For me it is better to
have something that is well integrated, functional and supported but
only fits the needs for about 80% of the people in need for a multi
master than having nothing and always pointing to very old or poor or
commercial commercial solutions.

But that is just my personal view on that. I know that a multi master
cluster is a very complex feature, but you can't always throw more
(the existing solutions need AFAIK at least four servers to be
redundant) or bigger hardware or expensive solutions if you only need
load balancing but your app needs to be able to write to whatever
server it is connected.

In that respect, I really like the solution in FrontBase, where you
can do multi master with two servers, schema synchronization is
included, you can connect or disconnect servers from the cluster at
any time, it is fully transparent for the application, you just add
more addresses to the JDBC connection string. This might not fit the
needs for a couple of users, but it fits for the vast majority.

Personally I can live without a multi master solution for PG at the
moment as I just use a different product if I need it and live with
the downsides of said product (cost for Oracle and similar, less
configuration options and lower performance with FrontBase, other
problems with other DMBS).

cug