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> I would not have risked my business (or budget) on Postgres 8, even with Slony-I.

This assumes you need replication, though. You can get pretty far without it, especially given how wide hardware you can get now.

> MySQL foot guns were mostly under control by 2010

Eh. :-) I think you would have to specify which footguns in particular.

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If you're doing tens of millions in revenue and the RDBMS is critical to your operations, I'm a firm believer you need replication. Keep in mind this was the era of spinning rust and a day-old backup could take hours to restore even with a SAN/DAS. A replica was for more than just distributing load, it was for resilience to keep the business healthy and avoid a SPOF.

Risks to the business are more important to me than my enthusiasm for a technology or product.

Replication can be for HA, not just for scale. All depends on your business requirements.

Also replication can be good for other operational reasons, such as zero downtime major version upgrades. Again depends on the business need/expectations.

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