Speaking from a non-profit whose enterprise data sits inside postgres, 
we would be willing to invest a few thousand dollars into the pot of 
synchronous multi-master replication. Postgres-r sounded absolutely 
marvelous to us back in the day that it was rumored to be one of the 
possible deliverables of 7.4.

Not so much for nine-nines of uptime, but for the case of being able to 
take a full hit on a DB box in production yet still remain running w/o 
any data loss. Our application servers are JBoss and will be 
high-available clustered / fully-mirrored, but even with RAID on the DB 
box one bad thing could take it down, and the data between the hourly 
backup would go down with it. We have experimented in-house with C-JDBC 
[ being 'lucky' enough to have all DB writes to go through JDBC ], but 
would feel more confident w/o involving another service in-between the 
application and the DB layers, especially since it is not yet fully 
high-available -- currently shifts the single-point of failure from the 
DB layer to the CJDBC controller single point. It is reported to have 
HA via group communication 'soon', but, you never can tell. Read up on 
it at http://c-jdbc.objectweb.org/ , but the end feel I got from it was 
not nearly so warm and cozy with the problem being solved at the right 
place -- the postgres-r way felt much more robust / speedy.

We won't ever have parallel oracle dollars, but we would have dollars 
to bring higher-availability to postgres. 'Cause its our butt on the 
line hosting our client's data.

----
James Robinson
Socialserve.com


Wed, 12 Nov 2003 19:46:11 -0500
James Robinson <jlrobins@socialserve.com>
Re: Proposal for a cascaded master-slave replication system
On Wed, Nov 12, 2003 at 07:46:11PM -0500, James Robinson wrote:
> Speaking from a non-profit whose enterprise data sits inside postgres, 
> we would be willing to invest a few thousand dollars into the pot of 
> synchronous multi-master replication. Postgres-r sounded absolutely 
> marvelous to us back in the day that it was rumored to be one of the 
> possible deliverables of 7.4.

As far as I know, Postgres-R hackers are eager for funding.  There is
a foundation which was established to fund such activities, in an
effort to pool the resources that people had to donate.  You could
ask in the Postgres-R mailing list about it.

A

-- 
----
Andrew Sullivan                         204-4141 Yonge Street
Afilias Canada                        Toronto, Ontario Canada
<andrew@libertyrms.info>                              M2P 2A8
                                         +1 416 646 3304 x110


Thu, 13 Nov 2003 10:06:34 -0500
Andrew Sullivan <andrew@libertyrms.info>
Re: Proposal for a cascaded master-slave replication system