Sounds an aweful lot like RAID level one :-) Why would a DB system need to do what RAID already does quite well? > Sorry, should've at least described 'shadowing'. A shadow is a > synchronous page-level (I think) mirror file. That is, when you open a > database /disk1/dbname.fdb and then issue a: > > > CREATE SHADOW 1 '/disk2/dbname.fdb'; > > CREATE SHADOW 2 '/disk3/dbname.fdb'; > > then all 3 files will be kept synchronized at all times. Each subsequent > page write will go to all 3 files (if any of the write fails, the > transaction fails, so it's not unlike a synchronous replication). > > Now suppose /disk1 fails, one of the shadow can be configured to > immediately take over as the master database, without any down time. We > can then add /disk4/dbname.fdb, for instance, to become a new shadow. > > Alternatively, when a shadow fails, IB/Firebird can refuse further > transactions until there is another shadow coming up, so the database is > shadowed all the time. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to majordomo@postgresql.org)