Will Django automatically switch to a slave if Multiple Databases are enabled and the master goes down?

Question

I am a Django n00b and am looking at the "MasterSlaveRouter" example located in the Django docs: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/multi-db/

In the example, if the "master" were to go down, would Django automatically switch to the slave so the site didn't go down? If not, does anyone have any tips/recommendations on how to accomplish this functionality with Django?

Answer 1

No, it will not. Automatic failover is hard to get right. The reason being that it's difficult to detect failures reliably. In case you've sorted it out (and your slave gets automatically promoted to master) you could change the ip-address of the old slave to the one of the failed master.