"David F. Skoll" <dfs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > My question is this: If the master database is fairly busy, gets > VACUUMed once a day, etc. can we expect the warm standby server > to work correctly after days/weeks/months/years of log shipping, > or should we periodically take new base backups? I don't think the time period is at issue. Log-shipping should keep the slave a perfect replica of the master (if it doesn't, we have problems anyway). The operational question you need to ask yourself is: if you haven't swapped to the slave lately, how do you know it will work when you need it to? The current backup/restore docs suggest as best practice that you intentionally swap master and slave periodically, ie, fail over to the slave and then re-initialize the master as a new slave. This provides a periodic test that your fail-over mechanisms actually work, and as a bonus gives you a chance for a maintenance window on the ex-master before it's brought up as new slave. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
