[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...