Re: Parallel Seq Scan

On 2015-02-06 22:57:43 -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 2:13 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> > My first comment here is that I think we should actually teach
> > heapam.c about parallelism.
> 
> I coded this up; see attached.  I'm also attaching an updated version
> of the parallel count code revised to use this API.  It's now called
> "parallel_count" rather than "parallel_dummy" and I removed some
> stupid stuff from it.  I'm curious to see what other people think, but
> this seems much cleaner to me.  With the old approach, the
> parallel-count code was duplicating some of the guts of heapam.c and
> dropping the rest on the floor; now it just asks for a parallel scan
> and away it goes.  Similarly, if your parallel-seqscan patch wanted to
> scan block-by-block rather than splitting the relation into equal
> parts, or if it wanted to participate in the synchronized-seqcan
> stuff, there was no clean way to do that.  With this approach, those
> decisions are - as they quite properly should be - isolated within
> heapam.c, rather than creeping into the executor.

I'm not convinced that that reasoning is generally valid. While it may
work out nicely for seqscans - which might be useful enough on its own -
the more stuff we parallelize the *more* the executor will have to know
about it to make it sane. To actually scale nicely e.g. a parallel sort
will have to execute the nodes below it on each backend, instead of
doing that in one as a separate step, ferrying over all tuples to
indivdual backends through queues, and only then parallezing the
sort.

Now. None of that is likely to matter immediately, but I think starting
to build the infrastructure at the points where we'll later need it does
make some sense.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

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