> However, if you were doing something like parallel pg_dump you could
> just run the parent and child instances all against the slave, so the
> pg_dump scenario doesn't seem to offer much of a supporting use-case for
> worrying about this. When would you really need to be able to do it?
If you had several standbys, you could distribute the work of the
pg_dump among them. This would be a huge speedup for a large database,
potentially, thanks to parallelization of I/O and network. Imagine
doing a pg_dump of a 300GB database in 10min.
-- -- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://www.pgexperts.com