"Do you need >= 3 nines?" No, it's a one person project. I'd be happy with a single 9 or even no 9s just a 99.0 haha

I switched to warm standby to reduce stress on the production db which was in the cloud. There is just a single production server and having it constantly run the heavy data processing MVs + handle queries was CPU intensive and slowed everything down. The CPU was costly.

To fix those issues, especially the CPU, I run the primary on a home server where it can crank the CPU as much as it wants running the data processing MVs and then sends the processed WALs to the warm standby that just handles the queries.

This has fixed those CPU and slow queries (when an MV is updating a table that is being constantly read). But introduced headaches anytime I update postgres.

My understanding is the 'fix' is to move data processing to another postgresql DB or flow? My biggest reason for not using another DB is I didn't like the idea of losing direct relations for keys.

Anyways, I appreciate the input, it's been a thorny issue I hit once or twice a year and am always unsure if what I'm doing is 'normal' or what I should do to fix it.