tsally, don't look!
I was hoping to see simple built-in replication in 8.4 (didn't make it into 8.3, see here: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/database-soup/postgresql-develop...), so I guess it's on the 8.5 wishlist.
I was hoping to see simple built-in replication in 8.4 (didn't make it into 8.3, see here: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/database-soup/postgresql-develop...), so I guess it's on the 8.5 wishlist.
Really, it's not that PostgreSQL needs more replication or built-in replication. It needs better replication than any of the current solutions. pgpool, while great as a connection pooler, is a terrible replication solution. Slony-I is based off triggers and its communication costs grow in quadratically (O(n^2) - yuck!). Plus, Slony-I requires an immense amount of setup for every table and every key. Mammoth replicator, which seems to be the closest to the right track, has a website that doesn't show much life and only a beta release for download. Plus, it still looks like there's a good amount of setup.
What we all really want is for PostgreSQL to implement a log-shipping based replication system where we can say "replicate this database" or "replicate these tables" to another server and have it just work. But there's nothing simple about that.
Work was happening to make it possible to read from the slave, and this was meant to go into 8.4. However, there were some issues and it got pulled from the release.
Hopefully we'll see it in 8.5. This is the only real way MySQL is beating Postgres at the moment.