A few questions to real pgsql gurus

Hi

We are working on a project and our client wants to use PostgreSQL as the
backend, since it will be a very mission critical 24x7 live environment, I
have to know a few things about postgresql before we can consider it.

1) Backups : Going through the documents I can see that there are no
incremental backups available in postgres yet, I may have overlooked it,
therefore, I would like to know:

    a) Am I right on the incremental backup ?
    b) what would be the performance impact of taking frequent backups
       ( Lets say every 2-3 hours ).
    c) Is it possible to restore tables selectively from a backup.
    d) Can we do a point in time restore from the backups.

2) Failover :

   a) is it possible to create a cluster of 2 (primary & secondary)
      databases.
   b) is it possible to configure an auto-failover to the secondary
      database in case primary dies.
   c) how reliable the replication is in postgresql, can a) & b) be
      implemented using replication.

      Auto-failover is very crucial for this project, so I would like
      to get as many reliable solutions for that as possible including
      3rd party applications ( like NetApp or whatever ) if there are
      any.

3) Functions & triggers : Our project would be heavily dependent on
   functions and triggers :

   a) I see postgresql supports many procedural languages, so what
      should be the preferred language to be used for functions/
      procedures ( i.e. is PL/PGSQL as fast as C is etc ).

Thanks
Mike




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