Using pglogical to synchronize data across instances - Amazon Aurora
Requirements and limitations

Using pglogical to synchronize data across instances

All currently available Aurora PostgreSQL versions support the pglogical extension. The pglogical extension predates the functionally similar logical replication feature that was introduced by PostgreSQL in version 10. For more information, see Overview of PostgreSQL logical replication with Aurora.

The pglogical extension supports logical replication between two or more Aurora PostgreSQL DB clusters. It also supports replication between different PostgreSQL versions, and between databases running on RDS for PostgreSQL DB instances and Aurora PostgreSQL DB clusters. The pglogical extension uses a publish-subscribe model to replicate changes to tables and other objects, such as sequences, from a publisher to a subscriber. It relies on a replication slot to ensure that changes are synchronized from a publisher node to a subscriber node, defined as follows.

  • The publisher node is the Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster that's the source of data to be replicated to other nodes. The publisher node defines the tables to be replicated in a publication set.

  • The subscriber node is the Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster that receives WAL updates from the publisher. The subscriber creates a subscription to connect to the publisher and get the decoded WAL data. When the subscriber creates the subscription, the replication slot is created on the publisher node.

Following, you can find information about setting up the pglogical extension.

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Requirements and limitations for the pglogical extension

All currently available releases of Aurora PostgreSQL support the pglogical extension.

Both the publisher node and the subscriber node must be set up for logical replication.

The tables that you want to replicate from a publisher to a subscriber must have the same names and the same schema. These tables must also contain the same columns, and the columns must use the same data types. Both publisher and subscriber tables must have the same primary keys. We recommend that you use only the PRIMARY KEY as the unique constraint.

The tables on the subscriber node can have more permissive constraints than those on the publisher node for CHECK constraints and NOT NULL constraints.

The pglogical extension provides features such as two-way replication that aren't supported by the logical replication feature built into PostgreSQL (version 10 and higher). For more information, see PostgreSQL bi-directional replication using pglogical.