Re: multiple $PGDATA dir's for one! postmaster?

On Thu, 2003-03-06 at 05:44, Tom Tom wrote:
> hi,
>
> is there anyway that one postmaster will manage
> different
> PGDATA directories (e.g. on different harddrives)?
> or is it restricted to one ?
>

This was a little ambigous to me, so heres the possible answers I came
up with:

a) You want to run postgresql but you'd like to split your database over
two physical hard drives. You can do this with multiple $pgdata's, but
you can symlink the files/directories under $pgdata to different hard
drives.

b) You like to switch back and forth between two different data dirs for
testing purposes. AFAIK you can do this, whenever you start/stop the
postmaster just pass it a different $pgdata string and it will read from
the new $pgdata dir. You'll need to make sure that the two servers are
running on different ports, but I can't think of any other hang-ups. You
should note though that both databases will actually be seperate
processes, with there own statistics and connection child processes,
just that they both will be started with the same binary.

Robert Treat