Making Sense of Backups and Replication

In Chapter 9, Handling Backup and Recovery, we learned a lot about backup and recovery, which is essential for administration. However, in large-scale systems, logical backups might not be what you’re looking for since they take a lot of time to implement, something that increases with the amount of data being handled. Therefore, we want to focus our attention on important topics such as binary backups and more advanced topics. This chapter is all about PostgreSQL’s transaction log and what we can do with it to improve our setup and make things more secure.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the following topics:

• Understanding the transaction log
• Transaction log archiving and recovery
• Setting up asynchronous replication
• Upgrading to synchronous replication
• Making use of replication slots
• Making use of the CREATE PUBLICATION and CREATE SUBSCRIPTION commands

By the end of this chapter, you&...