After introducing you to Slony, we will take a look at another popular replication tool. Skytools is a software package originally developed by Skype, which serves a variety of purposes. Skytools is not just a single program but a collection of tools and services, which you can use to enhance your replication setup.
In this chapter we will discuss the following topics related to Skytools:
- Building generic queues
- Using londiste for replication
- Handling XLOG and walmgr.py
Skytools is an open source package and can be downloaded freely from pgfoundry.org. For the purpose of this chapter we have used Version 3.1.4:
http://skytools.projects.pgfoundry.org/testing/skytools-3.1.4.tar.gz
To install the software, we first have to extract the TAR file and run configure. The important thing here is that we have to tell configure where to find pg_config. This is important to make Skytools know how to compile the code and where to look for libraries.
Once this has been executed successfully, we can run make and make install (which might have to run as root if PostgreSQL has been installed as root user).
./configure --with-pgconfig=/usr/local/pgsql/bin/pg_config make make install
Once the code has been compiled, we can move forward and use Skytools immediately.