High availability and Postgres

A friend contacted me today, asking me “What are the best practices for failover with Postgres?” And he mentioned pgpool-II.

He was interested in 9.0, since 9.1 hasn’t been released yet. (but, it’s looking like we’re gearing up for a September release!)

My off-the-cuff response was:

There isn’t a single solution, although pgpool-II is a common one.

pgpool-II is what I’ve used in AWS. I’ve also seen people use heartbeat (I guess pacemaker now?). I think either works fine. The frustrating bit is that we don’t have the ability to refresh the failed system easily.

There’s also repmgr: https://github.com/greg2ndQuadrant/repmgr

It’s new, but might be worth exploring.

I started an High Availability page on the PostgreSQL wiki. We really need a canonical source of information for this. Devs are struggling to figure it out from our docs.

What are you doing for HA and Postgres?

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  1. Automated failover without abstracted DSN’s scares me. Is there a pg solution that includes the abstraction of the DSN?