On Nov 21, 2007, at 2:53 AM, Stéphane A. Schildknecht wrote:

> I'm afraid you're facing a real limitation of the actual versions. You
> have to let the first synchronisation begin with an empty slave  
> database.


True, but if you create your replication table by table, the pain of  
the copy is reduced.

Basically, you create your set with some small set of tables.  Start  
replication.  Then add a few more tables to another set, start that  
replicating. Once done, merge sets.  Later rinse repeat until you're  
done with all tables and have one set left.

This will of course be difficult if you need to add additional  
replicas... :-(

What I usually do is drop all indexes on the replica (except PK's) and  
add them later once the initial copy is done.  You don't need to use  
slony's execute script methods to add/delete indexes.