The Importance of Replication

Replication is needed in three main areas: ensuring high availability to minimize downtime, scaling resources by offloading reads to different servers, and as a means of additional data protection or recovery. Replication is crucial in cloud environments where downtime must be minimized, and it is also useful for scenarios where one machine is not sufficient to handle resource saturation. However, replication should not be relied upon solely as a backup solution, as it lacks the ability for point-in-time recovery or data restoration. Physical replication is a reliable and widely used method that involves replaying all changes made to the primary database on standby servers. Logical replication, on the other hand, is based on capturing wall records and is suited for use cases where the destination database differs from the source.