When a Gather or Gather Merge node is started and stopped multiple
times, the old code wouldn't reset the shared state between executions,
potentially resulting in dramatically inflated instrumentation data
for nodes beneath it. (The per-worker instrumentation ended up OK,
I think, but the overall totals were inflated.)
Report by hubert depesz lubaczewski. Analysis and fix by Amit Kapila,
reviewed and tweaked a bit by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/20171127175631.GA405@depesz.com
If a PARAM_EXEC parameter is used below a Gather (Merge) but the InitPlan
that computes it is attached to or above the Gather (Merge), force the
value to be computed before starting parallelism and pass it down to all
workers. This allows us to use parallelism in cases where it previously
would have had to be rejected as unsafe. We do - in this case - lose the
optimization that the value is only computed if it's actually used. An
alternative strategy would be to have the first worker that needs the value
compute it, but one downside of that approach is that we'd then need to
select a parallel-safe path to compute the parameter value; it couldn't for
example contain a Gather (Merge) node. At some point in the future, we
might want to consider both approaches.
Independent of that consideration, there is a great deal more work that
could be done to make more kinds of PARAM_EXEC parameters parallel-safe.
This infrastructure could be used to allow a Gather (Merge) on the inner
side of a nested loop (although that's not a very appealing plan) and
cases where the InitPlan is attached below the Gather (Merge) could be
addressed as well using various techniques. But this is a good start.
Amit Kapila, reviewed and revised by me. Reviewing and testing from
Kuntal Ghosh, Haribabu Kommi, and Tushar Ahuja.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAA4eK1LV0Y1AUV4cUCdC+sYOx0Z0-8NAJ2Pd9=UKsbQ5Sr7+JQ@mail.gmail.com
Our initial work with int128 neglected alignment considerations, an
oversight that came back to bite us in bug #14897 from Vincent Lachenal.
It is unsurprising that int128 might have a 16-byte alignment requirement;
what's slightly more surprising is that even notoriously lax Intel chips
sometimes enforce that.
Raising MAXALIGN seems out of the question: the costs in wasted disk and
memory space would be significant, and there would also be an on-disk
compatibility break. Nor does it seem very practical to try to allow some
data structures to have more-than-MAXALIGN alignment requirement, as we'd
have to push knowledge of that throughout various code that copies data
structures around.
The only way out of the box is to make type int128 conform to the system's
alignment assumptions. Fortunately, gcc supports that via its
__attribute__(aligned()) pragma; and since we don't currently support
int128 on non-gcc-workalike compilers, we shouldn't be losing any platform
support this way.
Although we could have just done pg_attribute_aligned(MAXIMUM_ALIGNOF) and
called it a day, I did a little bit of extra work to make the code more
portable than that: it will also support int128 on compilers without
__attribute__(aligned()), if the native alignment of their 128-bit-int
type is no more than that of int64.
Add a regression test case that exercises the one known instance of the
problem, in parallel aggregation over a bigint column.
This will need to be back-patched, along with the preparatory commit
91aec93e6. But let's see what the buildfarm makes of it first.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20171110185747.31519.28038@wrigleys.postgresql.org
Without this fix, dropping a role can sometimes result in parallel
query failures in sessions that have used "SET ROLE" to assume the
dropped role, even if that setting isn't active any more.
Report by Pavan Deolasee. Patch by Amit Kapila, reviewed by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CABOikdOomRcZsLsLK+Z+qENM1zxyaWnAvFh3MJZzZnnKiF+REg@mail.gmail.com
This was always intended to work, but due to an oversight in
max_parallel_hazard_walker, it didn't. In testing, we missed the
fact that it was only working for custom plans, where the parameter
value has been substituted for the parameter itself early enough
that everything worked. In a generic plan, the Param node survives
and must be treated as parallel-safe. SerializeParamList provides
for the transmission of parameter values to workers.
Amit Kapila with help from Kuntal Ghosh. Some changes by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAA4eK1+_BuZrmVCeua5Eqnm4Co9DAXdM5HPAOE2J19ePbR912Q@mail.gmail.com
If we only need, say, 10 tuples in total, then we certainly don't need
more than 10 tuples from any single process. Pushing down the limit
lets workers exit early when possible. For Gather Merge, there is
an additional benefit: a Sort immediately below the Gather Merge can
be done as a bounded sort if there is an applicable limit.
Robert Haas and Tom Lane
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoYa3QKKrLj5rX7UvGqhH73G1Li4B-EKxrmASaca2tFu9Q@mail.gmail.com
Test that blessed records can be transferred through a TupleQueue and
correctly decoded by another backend. While touching the file, make
sure that force_parallel_mode settings only cover relevant tests.
Author: Thomas Munro, editorialized by Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170823054644.efuzftxjpfi6wwqs%40alap3.anarazel.de
That code patch was good as far as it went, but the associated test case
has exposed fundamental brain damage in the parallel scan mechanism,
which is going to take nontrivial work to correct. In the interests of
getting the buildfarm back to green so that unrelated work can proceed,
let's temporarily remove the test case.
is_parallel_safe() supposed that the only relevant property of a SubPlan
was the parallel safety of the referenced subplan tree. This is wrong:
the testexpr or args subtrees might contain parallel-unsafe stuff, as
demonstrated by the test case added here. However, just recursing into the
subtrees fails in a different way: we'll typically find PARAM_EXEC Params
representing the subplan's output columns in the testexpr. The previous
coding supposed that any Param must be treated as parallel-restricted, so
that a naive attempt at fixing this disabled parallel pushdown of SubPlans
altogether. We must instead determine, for any visited Param, whether it
is one that would be computed by a surrounding SubPlan node; if so, it's
safe to push down along with the SubPlan node.
We might later be able to extend this logic to cope with Params used for
correlated subplans and other cases; but that's a task for v11 or beyond.
Tom Lane and Amit Kapila
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/7064.1492022469@sss.pgh.pa.us
Like Gather, we spawn multiple workers and run the same plan in each
one; however, Gather Merge is used when each worker produces the same
output ordering and we want to preserve that output ordering while
merging together the streams of tuples from various workers. (In a
way, Gather Merge is like a hybrid of Gather and MergeAppend.)
This works out to a win if it saves us from having to perform an
expensive Sort. In cases where only a small amount of data would need
to be sorted, it may actually be faster to use a regular Gather node
and then sort the results afterward, because Gather Merge sometimes
needs to wait synchronously for tuples whereas a pure Gather generally
doesn't. But if this avoids an expensive sort then it's a win.
Rushabh Lathia, reviewed and tested by Amit Kapila, Thomas Munro,
and Neha Sharma, and reviewed and revised by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAGPqQf09oPX-cQRpBKS0Gq49Z+m6KBxgxd_p9gX8CKk_d75HoQ@mail.gmail.com
The index is scanned by a single process, but then all cooperating
processes can iterate jointly over the resulting set of heap blocks.
In the future, we might also want to support using a parallel bitmap
index scan to set up for a parallel bitmap heap scan, but that's a
job for another day.
Dilip Kumar, with some corrections and cosmetic changes by me. The
larger patch set of which this is a part has been reviewed and tested
by (at least) Andres Freund, Amit Khandekar, Tushar Ahuja, Rafia
Sabih, Haribabu Kommi, Thomas Munro, and me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAFiTN-uc4=0WxRGfCzs-xfkMYcSEWUC-Fon6thkJGjkh9i=13A@mail.gmail.com
Commit 45be99f8cd took the position
that performing a merge join in parallel was not likely to work out
well, but this conclusion was greeted with skepticism even at the
time. Whether it was true then or not, it's clearly not true any
more now that we have parallel index scan.
Dilip Kumar, reviewed by Amit Kapila and by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAFiTN-v3=cM6nyFwFGp0fmvY4=kk79Hq9Fgu0u8CSJ-EEq1Tiw@mail.gmail.com
Commit 5262f7a4fc added similar support
for parallel index scans; this extends that work to index-only scans.
As with parallel index scans, this requires support from the index AM,
so currently parallel index-only scans will only be possible for btree
indexes.
Rafia Sabih, reviewed and tested by Rahila Syed, Tushar Ahuja,
and Amit Kapila
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAOGQiiPEAs4C=TBp0XShxBvnWXuzGL2u++Hm1=qnCpd6_Mf8Fw@mail.gmail.com
In combination with 569174f1be, which
taught the btree AM how to perform parallel index scans, this allows
parallel index scan plans on btree indexes. This infrastructure
should be general enough to support parallel index scans for other
index AMs as well, if someone updates them to support parallel
scans.
Amit Kapila, reviewed and tested by Anastasia Lubennikova, Tushar
Ahuja, and Haribabu Kommi, and me.
When min_parallel_relation_size was added, the only supported type
of parallel scan was a parallel sequential scan, but there are
pending patches for parallel index scan, parallel index-only scan,
and parallel bitmap heap scan. Those patches introduce two new
types of complications: first, what's relevant is not really the
total size of the relation but the portion of it that we will scan;
and second, index pages and heap pages shouldn't necessarily be
treated in exactly the same way. Typically, the number of index
pages will be quite small, but that doesn't necessarily mean that
a parallel index scan can't pay off.
Therefore, we introduce min_parallel_table_scan_size, which works
out a degree of parallelism for scans based on the number of table
pages that will be scanned (and which is therefore equivalent to
min_parallel_relation_size for parallel sequential scans) and also
min_parallel_index_scan_size which can be used to work out a degree
of parallelism based on the number of index pages that will be
scanned.
Amit Kapila and Robert Haas
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAA4eK1KowGSYYVpd2qPpaPPA5R90r++QwDFbrRECTE9H_HvpOg@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAA4eK1+TnM4pXQbvn7OXqam+k_HZqb0ROZUMxOiL6DWJYCyYow@mail.gmail.com
This doesn't do anything to make Param nodes anything other than
parallel-restricted, so this only helps with uncorrelated subplans,
and it's not necessarily very cheap because each worker will run the
subplan separately (just as a Hash Join will build a separate copy of
the hash table in each participating process), but it's a first step
toward supporting cases that are more likely to help in practice, and
is occasionally useful on its own.
Amit Kapila, reviewed and tested by Rafia Sabih, Dilip Kumar, and
me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAA4eK1+e8Z45D2n+rnDMDYsVEb5iW7jqaCH_tvPMYau=1Rru9w@mail.gmail.com
Remove the plpgsql wrapping that hides the context. So now the test
will fail if the work doesn't actually happen in a parallel worker. Run
the test in its own test group to ensure it won't run out of resources
for that.
The previous code neglected the fact that the scanjoin_target might
carry sortgroupref labelings that we need to absorb. Instead, do
create_projection_path() unconditionally, and tweak the path's cost
estimate after the fact. (I'm now convinced that we ought to refactor
the way we account for sometimes not needing a separate projection step,
but right now is not the time for that sort of cleanup.)
Problem identified by Amit Kapila, patch by me.
Commit 04ae11f62e removed some broken
code to apply the scan/join target to partial paths, but its theory
that this processing step is totally unnecessary turns out to be wrong.
Put similar code back again, but this time, check for parallel-safety
and avoid in-place modifications to paths that may already have been
used as part of some other path.
(This is not an entirely elegant solution to this problem; it might
be better, for example, to postpone generate_gather_paths for the
topmost scan/join rel until after the scan/join target has been
applied. But this is not the time for such redesign work.)
Amit Kapila and Robert Haas
In commit 8c1d9d56e9, I attempted to
add a regression test that would fail if the target list was pushed
into a parallel worker, but due to brain fade on my part, it just
randomly fails whether anything bad or not, because the error check
inside the parallel_restricted() function tests whether there is
*any process in the system* that is not connected to a client, not
whether the process running the query is not connected to a client.
A little experimentation has left me pessimistic about the
prospects of doing better here in a short amount of time, so let's
just fall back to checking that the plan is as we expect and leave
the execution-time check for another day.
Commit 14a254fb52 managed not to
exercise the code it was intended to test, and the comment explaining
why no "parallel worker" line showed up in the context wasn't right.
Amit Kapila, tweaked by me per Amit's analysis.
Robert Haas