In Chapter 9, Handling Backup and Recovery, we learned a lot about backup and recovery, which is essential for administration. So far, only logical backups have been covered; I am about to change that in this chapter.
This chapter is all about PostgreSQL's transaction log and what we can do with it to improve our setup and to make things more secure.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- What the transaction log does and why it is needed
- Performing point-in-time recovery
- Setting up streaming replication
- Replication conflicts
- Monitoring replication
- Synchronous versus asynchronous replication
- Understanding timelines
- Logical replication
- Creating subscriptions and publications
At the end of this chapter, you will be able to set up transaction log archiving and replication. Keep in mind that this chapter can never be a comprehensive guide to replication; it is only a short introduction. Full coverage of replication would require around 500 pages. Just for a comparison, PostgreSQL Replication by Packt Publishing alone is close to 400 pages.
This chapter will cover the most essential things in a more compact form.