You can find skytools3 in debian experimental already, it’s in release candidate status. What’s missing is the documentation, so here’s an idea: I’m going to make a blog post series about skytools next features, how to use them, what they are good for, etc. This first article of the series will just list what are those new features.

Here are the slides from the CHAR(11) talk I made last month, about that very subject:

The new version comes with a lot of new features.
PGQ now is able to duplicate the queue events from one node to the next, so that it’s able to manage switching over. To do that we have three types of nodes now, root, branch and leaf.
PGQ also supports cooperative consumers, meaning that you can share the processing load among many consumers, or workers.

Londiste now benefits from the switch over feature, and is packed with new little features like add <table> --create, the new --trigger-flags argument, and the new --handler thing (to do e.g. partial table replication). Let’s not forget the much awaited execute <script> command that allows to include DDL commands into the replication stream, nor the parallel COPY support that will boost your initial setup.

walmgr in the new version behaves correctly when using PostgreSQL 9.0. Meaning that as soon as no more WAL files are available in the archives, it returns an error code to the archiver so that the server switches to streaming live from the primary_conninfo, then back to replaying the files from the archive if the connection were to fail, etc. All in all, it just works.

Details to follow here, stay tuned!