I am in a situation where we have to deploy a hot standby to a postgres db server. There is no custom tablespace and all data files are in $PGDATA I was thinking of using PITR []http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/backup-online.html] to achieve that and here are my thoughts: 1. Continuously copy WAL files to the standby. 2. The standby is always in "recovery" mode, that is whenever it gets a WAL file, it recovers to that WAL file. 3. Always copy the "incomplete WAL" file to a different location. This is the "current" file. When the standby is activated, it checks to see if it has any complete WAL file to recover from? And if it has, it recovers to that file. At the end it recovers to the incomplete current file and the standby is now "recovered" up to a point in time. My concerns are as follows? 1. Is the above feasible? 2. What are the gotchas if somebody has already done that? 3. Is there something I can do more efficiently? I looked at SLONY and it can back up only tables with primary keys. The current schema on the primary does not have all the tables with primary keys and we cannot change the schema! Thanks in advance Dhaval Shah
