[morganpyne]

Simple reliable replication has been a huge differentiator for a long time; enough so to put up with a lot of the other faults of MySQL. Have not revisited Postgres replication in a long time but I have seen that it has been worked on. Anyone with recent experience in both care to explain how the replication of both stacks up in recent versions?

[moe]

Simple reliable replication

I cringe every time I read that. MySQL replication is many things, but it is not reliable (as anyone who has used it at scale will confirm).

I think the only reason this myth prevails is because hardly anyone ever actually verifies if their master/slave are in sync. A table checksum can be a real eye-opener here, especially on a deployment that's been running for while and undergone schema changes, restarts, network splits, etc.

[obtu]

<rant>Simple, but not reliable. I've seen admins enable statement-based replication without understanding it, and trash the db. Which is generally my gripe with MySQL: it has some popular features that only work if you don't look at them too closely; starting with support for the SQL standard.</rant>

PostgreSQL's built-in replication is pretty easy to set up[1] and provides a writable master, and a cascade of slaves. Slaves can be synchronous or asynchronous, and the synchronicity can be turned off per transaction.

[1] http://www.depesz.com/2011/01/24/waiting-for-9-1-pg_baseback...