Re: Catching up Production from Warm Standby after maintenance - Please help

We are using v. 8.3.1 at present.  We anticipate a terabyte of data each year starting in November, and I am concerned about what happens maintenance-wise a couple of years down the line.  I think that we won't be able to do vacuuming/reindexing with the machine online and serving users if the database is over a certain size.  Am I wrong?

Our set up allows the users to create and delete ad-hoc tables in their own namespaces (each user has his own schema in addition to some overall schemas for the project).  Since Slony does not automatically handle "create table" and "drop table", I would have to incorporate that into the infrastructure APIs that create & drop tables and sequenes.  I think it would be non-trivial to implement a full-on, total replication scenario.  We are using Slony now for a select group of tables, but it's a separate API to add a table or remove it from replication.

What do you do when you have to do maintenance?  Don't you take your primary offline and clean it?  Or is this old-school thinking?  I am coming from a Sybase environment, and previously I was able to use transaction logs to catch up post-maintenance. 

It seems odd to me to have a fast, powerful machine left solely in warm standby recovery mode that  cannot be used to alleviate the pressures of DB maintenance.  My systems admin has done nothing but complain about a "wasted" machine - he does not see the value of having the standby.  Of course, if it were Slony'd, we could use it, I suppose.

Thanks for your help,
Jennifer

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Date: Tue, 7 Jul 2009 07:33:16 -0400
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] Catching up Production from Warm Standby after maintenance - Please help
From: scott.lists@enterprisedb.com
To: jenniferm411@hotmail.com
CC: scott.marlowe@gmail.com; pgsql-admin@postgresql.org

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