Quick start on Hot Standby

Updated.

We could have some better end-user documentation around creating a warm or hot standby system for basic postgresql replication.

To this end, I created a Quick Start doc on the wiki, but it could use more help. Maybe we should create some setup recipes for common situations?

Also – I wrote the following script during a hot standby bugbash PDXPUG had today:


#!/bin/sh

BINPATH=/usr/local/pg90/bin
CP=/bin/cp
PGCTL=${BINPATH}/pg_ctl
PSQL=${BINPATH}/psql
INITDB=${BINPATH}/initdb

sudo mkdir -p /var/tmp/archive
sudo chown ${USER} /var/tmp/archive

${INITDB} hotstandby1

echo 'wal_level = hot_standby' >> hotstandby1/postgresql.conf
echo 'archive_mode = on' >> hotstandby1/postgresql.conf
echo "archive_command = 'cp %p /var/tmp/archive/%f'" >> hotstandby1/postgresql.conf
echo "archive_timeout = 60" >> hotstandby1/postgresql.conf
echo "port = 6543" >> hotstandby1/postgresql.conf

${PGCTL} -D hotstandby1 start -l hotstandby1.log
sleep 5

${PSQL} -p 6543 postgres -c "select pg_start_backup('backup')"
${CP} -pR hotstandby1/ hotstandby2
${PSQL} -p 6543 postgres -c "select pg_stop_backup()"
rm hotstandby2/postmaster.pid
rm hotstandby2/pg_xlog/*

echo 'hot_standby = on' >> hotstandby2/postgresql.conf
echo 'port = 6544' >> hotstandby2/postgresql.conf
echo "standby_mode = 'on'" >> hotstandby2/recovery.conf
echo "restore_command = 'cp -i /var/tmp/archive/%f %p'" >> hotstandby2/recovery.conf

${PGCTL} -D hotstandby2 start -l hotstandby2.log

* Added port specification in case you’ve already got postgres running. Added a BINPATH for custom install directories.

2 thoughts on Quick start on Hot Standby

Comments are closed.

  1. Does the hot standby stuff deal well with schema changes? Are they automatically replicated to the standby database?

  2. Maria –
    Yes, all changes to the database cluster are replicated to the standby. Thanks for asking! I’ll add that to the FAQ!

    -selena