Teaching Slony replication to select slave nodes

Question

There is a system with up to 256 nodes in db cluster. We need to replicate some data from one of them across to all others. But for every row to replicate there is a list of nodes where it must be replicated while on other nodes same row becomes orphan without one of parent table keys. To filter them out, or to prevent them from replicating needlessly, I'm trying to find a way to teach Slony to select nodes for replication however can't find such feature readily available. Has anyone tried it (customizing source code of its functions, etc.)?

_id,_text,_nodes
----------------
1   'one' {1,101} 
2   'two' {2,102}
256 '...' {0,256}

Row id=1 is then replicated to node 1 and 101, etc.

Similar discussion Replicating only significant records to specific database however doesn't point in the right direction yet.

Answer 1

I was able to achieve this with PGQ using push-pull queuing schema. Biggest challenge was programming consumers correctly but now it works great! Also faster than Slon.

Answer 2

I don't see a way to do this directly. As I understand it, Slony sets replication destinations on the table, not row, level.

How I would solve this specific problem would be to materialize views based on replication destination group, and then use triggers to maintain those. Slony should then be able to replicate these tables to the slaves. I don't know if you can have triggers on the slaves that populate the main tables, but if not, there are ways around that. This requires decoupling the initial tables from the replication, and adds some complexity, of course.