AFAICT PG doesn't have any
support for replication/failover/clustering and the like.
There is some support for replication in PG 7.1. It's mostly a framework, is query-based so not likely to be a good performer. But at least it's possible now if you're willing to do the work.
Future plans are to replicate from the WAL (REDO log in the Oracle world). May or may not happen by PG 7.2.
Failover is also on the plate for the future.
None of this is meant to suggest you be a guinea pig. For one thing, the existing replication stuff is definitely a low-rent solution, probably not adequate for heavy-duty use.
It is clear that the major corporate winner of the .com revolution was Oracle Corporation, I doubt you'll get much disagreement over that. Sun and Cisco sold a bunch more iron, sure, but AFAIK only Oracle managed to force folks to buy a license for the web which was considerably higher for a license on the same machine if it weren't being used as a webserver.
Can you imagine Cisco trying to sell routers for 4x their normal price if they were to be plugged into a network serving a large website?
