The ExecReScan machinery contains various optimizations for postponing
or skipping rescans of plan subtrees; for example a HashAgg node may
conclude that it can re-use the table it built before, instead of
re-reading its input subtree. But that is wrong if the input contains
a parallel-aware table scan node, since the portion of the table scanned
by the leader process is likely to vary from one rescan to the next.
This explains the timing-dependent buildfarm failures we saw after
commit a2b70c89c.
The established mechanism for showing that a plan node's output is
potentially variable is to mark it as depending on some runtime Param.
Hence, to fix this, invent a dummy Param (one that has a PARAM_EXEC
parameter number, but carries no actual value) associated with each Gather
or GatherMerge node, mark parallel-aware nodes below that node as dependent
on that Param, and arrange for ExecReScanGather[Merge] to flag that Param
as changed whenever the Gather[Merge] node is rescanned.
This solution breaks an undocumented assumption made by the parallel
executor logic, namely that all rescans of nodes below a Gather[Merge]
will happen synchronously during the ReScan of the top node itself.
But that's fundamentally contrary to the design of the ExecReScan code,
and so was doomed to fail someday anyway (even if you want to argue
that the bug being fixed here wasn't a failure of that assumption).
A follow-on patch will address that issue. In the meantime, the worst
that's expected to happen is that given very bad timing luck, the leader
might have to do all the work during a rescan, because workers think
they have nothing to do, if they are able to start up before the eventual
ReScan of the leader's parallel-aware table scan node has reset the
shared scan state.
Although this problem exists in 9.6, there does not seem to be any way
for it to manifest there. Without GatherMerge, it seems that a plan tree
that has a rescan-short-circuiting node below Gather will always also
have one above it that will short-circuit in the same cases, preventing
the Gather from being rescanned. Hence we won't take the risk of
back-patching this change into 9.6. But v10 needs it.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAA4eK1JkByysFJNh9M349u_nNjqETuEnY_y1VUc_kJiU0bxtaQ@mail.gmail.com
Tom Lane
7df2c1f8da