Re: initial pruning in parallel append

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> ... Second, we've generally made a
> decision up until now that we don't want to have a hard dependency on
> stable functions actually being stable. If they aren't, and for
> example you're using index expressions, your queries may return wrong
> answers, but you won't get weird internal error messages, and you
> won't get a crash. I think the bar for this feature is the same.

Yeah, I agree --- wrong answers may be acceptable in such a case, but
crashes or unintelligible error messages aren't.  There are practical
reasons for being tolerant here, notably that it's not that easy
for users to get their volatility markings right.

In the case at hand, I think that means that allowing workers to do
pruning would require hardening the parallel append code against the
situation where their pruning results vary.  Maybe, instead of passing
the pruning results *down*, we could pass them *up* to the leader and
then throw an error if they're different?

            regards, tom lane