I'm currently looking for a good way to benefit from an existing Slony (Slony-I) setup (1 Master, 1 Slave) in terms of load balancing read requests to PostgreSQL.
After some intense searching on mailing lists, forums etc. I could not find very valuable resources regarding my situation. Slony-I and Hibernate does not seem to be a popular solution. Anyway, I found the most promising info here:
Hibernate and Master/Slave replicated databases
Gavin suggested to solve this issue at the JDBC level via C-JDBC, which is now Sequoia. I'm currently looking into Sequioa but have the feeling that it comes with its own replication solution.
I'd love to add an additional business check that prevents someone from writing data to the master, read from the slave. Did anyone gain experience yet in this matter? Any hints would be greatly appreciated!