Re: Question from someone who is not trained in computer sciences

[Ben Chobot <bench@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sep 5, 2019, at 2:00 PM, Judith Lacoste <jlacoste@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi,

I plan to install the database on a server in the office. Me and my four colleagues will occasionally connect to this database when we are working in other locations (usually hospitals or universities). In such remote locations, we often do not have internet/network, yet we still need to access the database.  Currently, we use a system where a copy of the database lives on each of our laptops.  We can access all the information in the database despite being offline.  This local copy of the database is synchronized with the server once network becomes available again. 

My question is whether or not such set up is possible with PostgreSQL?  

This ranges from very easy to technically-possible-but-very-difficult, depending upon what you and your colleagues do with you local copies of the data. If your database schema and activities are such that your local edits will trample over each other, reconciling those changes automatically when you return to your office might be a challenge. If, however, you and your colleagues each change different rows, or even better make no changes on your local copies, then this becomes much easier.

While it isn't the simpliest tool to set up, if you're planning to make edits to your local databases then bucardo is a replication package that can give you want you want. (Really any multi-master replication tool should work, but bucardo has an advantage in that it was designed with unreliable connectivity in mind.) 

If you're planning to have your local databases be read-only, then virtually any asynchronous replication strategy for postgres will work. (This means almost all of them.)