I worked many years at 2ndQuadrant; in 2020 it was acquired by EDB, where I now work as the Vice President of Solutions Architecture, leading a team who helps our customers implement Bi-Directional Replication (BDR) for PostgreSQL. Before that, I worked at the University of Florence as a researcher in Mathematics, using Free Software since 1997. I have been a board member of the Italian PostgreSQL User Group (ITPUG); I helped organising the first European PGDay in Prato, Italy (2008) and many editions of the the Italian PGDay. I am an author of several editions of the PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook.
This presentation discusses what is High Availability, and why one needs it. We will then examine more closely some of the features which are relevant for HA and more generally for achieving a given RPO and RTO, through a worked example of the life cycle of a transaction from the viewpoint of its durability.