The original parallel sequential scan commit included only very limited
changes to the EXPLAIN output. Aggregated totals from all workers were
displayed, but there was no way to see what each individual worker did
or to distinguish the effort made by the workers from the effort made by
the leader.
Per a gripe by Thom Brown (and maybe others). Patch by me, reviewed
by Amit Kapila.
In addition, this path fills in a number of missing bits and pieces in
the parallel infrastructure. Paths and plans now have a parallel_aware
flag indicating whether whatever parallel-aware logic they have should
be engaged. It is believed that we will need this flag for a number of
path/plan types, not just sequential scans, which is why the flag is
generic rather than part of the SeqScan structures specifically.
Also, execParallel.c now gives parallel nodes a chance to initialize
their PlanState nodes from the DSM during parallel worker startup.
Amit Kapila, with a fair amount of adjustment by me. Review of previous
patch versions by Haribabu Kommi and others.
Commit b0b0d84b3d purported to make it
possible to relaunch workers using the same parallel context, but it had
an unpleasant race condition: we might reinitialize after the workers
have sent their last control message but before they have dettached the
DSM, leaving to crashes. Repair by introducing a new ParallelContext
operation, ReinitializeParallelDSM.
Adjust execParallel.c to use this new support, so that we can rescan a
Gather node by relaunching workers but without needing to recreate the
DSM.
Amit Kapila, with some adjustments by me. Extracted from latest parallel
sequential scan patch.
In the previous coding, before returning from ExecutorRun, we'd shut
down all parallel workers. This was dead wrong if ExecutorRun was
called with a non-zero tuple count; it had the effect of truncating
the query output. To fix, give ExecutePlan control over whether to
enter parallel mode, and have it refuse to do so if the tuple count
is non-zero. Rewrite the Gather logic so that it can cope with being
called outside parallel mode.
Commit 7aea8e4f2d is largely to blame
for this problem, though this patch modifies some subsequently-committed
code which relied on the guarantees it purported to make.
A Gather executor node runs any number of copies of a plan in an equal
number of workers and merges all of the results into a single tuple
stream. It can also run the plan itself, if the workers are
unavailable or haven't started up yet. It is intended to work with
the Partial Seq Scan node which will be added in future commits.
It could also be used to implement parallel query of a different sort
by itself, without help from Partial Seq Scan, if the single_copy mode
is used. In that mode, a worker executes the plan, and the parallel
leader does not, merely collecting the worker's results. So, a Gather
node could be inserted into a plan to split the execution of that plan
across two processes. Nested Gather nodes aren't currently supported,
but we might want to add support for that in the future.
There's nothing in the planner to actually generate Gather nodes yet,
so it's not quite time to break out the champagne. But we're getting
close.
Amit Kapila. Some designs suggestions were provided by me, and I also
reviewed the patch. Single-copy mode, documentation, and other minor
changes also by me.
This code provides infrastructure for a parallel leader to start up
parallel workers to execute subtrees of the plan tree being executed
in the master. User-supplied parameters from ParamListInfo are passed
down, but PARAM_EXEC parameters are not. Various other constructs,
such as initplans, subplans, and CTEs, are also not currently shared.
Nevertheless, there's enough here to support a basic implementation of
parallel query, and we can lift some of the current restrictions as
needed.
Amit Kapila and Robert Haas
Robert Haas