On Tue, 14 Apr 2009, William Temperley wrote:
> I could potentially run a database in each of these countries and
> provide 100% uptime, obviously raising the issue of version conflicts
> that would require hand-merging.
It sounds like you want an asynchronous master-slave database architecture
where the slaves can also send changes back to the master, but didn't know
that's what you should be looking for. A quick glance at
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Replication%2C_Clustering%2C_and_Connection_Pooling
suggests Bucardo and Londiste might be useful tools for you to
investigate; I don't think Slony or Mammoth can handle slaves generating
their own transactions and feeding them to the master, but given how
complicated Slony is maybe I just don't know how to do it there.
The Londiste tutorial at
http://pgsql.tapoueh.org/site/html/londiste/londiste.html even starts out
with a business situation that sounds similar to yours.
I would suggest that if you're new to the area of replication, do not
assume that just because these tools look complicated that you'd be better
off rolling your own. The reason they're complicated is because they're
filled with solutions to hard problems most people never even think they
need to solve, until they get bit by one.
--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD