Streaming replication status and fail over questions

I'm investigating moving from slony to streaming replication as we plan some upgrades from 8.x versions of postgres to 9. I've managed to get it working but there's a couple questions I've been unable to find answers to so far.

1) I've seen things about using pg_current_xlog_location(), pg_last_xlog_replay_location(), pg_last_xlog_receive_location() to check replication status, but how can this tell me either the time lag or actual query lag? Do I need to wait for 9.1 and it's replication monitoring features?

2) If I have a master to multi-slave setup and need to fail over, is there anyway for slaves to detect the new master? Without this it seems like fail over could be pretty messy.

3) Finally just wanted to confirm that SR allows only for replication of an entire server.


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Michael Holt, Database Administrator  |  TERAPEAK
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