There are several approaches on replication/failover - you might have heard of Slony, Londiste, pgPool and some other tools. WAL Replication is different from all of them in one aspect - it doesn't let you query slave database (until 9.0, in ...

The BIG feature. The feature that made PostgreSQL leap from 8.4 to 9.0. Patch was written by Fujii Masao, and committed by Heikki Linnakangas on 15th of January 2010: Log Message: ----------- Introduce Streaming Replication.   This includes two new kinds of postmaster processes, walsenders ...

On 19th of December Simon Riggs committed a patch that will quite likely be the single most-talked-about change in PostgreSQL 8.5: Log Message: ----------- Allow read only connections during recovery, known as Hot Standby.   Enabled by recovery_connections = on (default) and forcing archive ...