Re: Rename max_parallel_degree?

On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 8:30 AM, David G. Johnston
<david.g.johnston@gmail.com> wrote:
> How big is the hazard of future-naming this and documenting the present
> limitation?  Is the casual user reading explains even going to be aware of
> that particular implementation detail?

Well, see, the nice thing about max_parallel_degree is that it is very
slightly ambiguous, just enough to paper over this.  But I'm going to
oppose naming the GUC inaccurately based on a hoped-for future
development project.

Another way to paper over the difference that would be to call this
max_parallel_workers_per_operation.  Then we can document that an
operation is a Gather node, and in the future we could document that
it's now a statement.  However, if we pick a name like this, then
we're sort of implying that this GUC will control DDL, too.

I think we should just go with max_parallel_workers for a limit on
total parallel workers within max_work_processes, and
max_parallel_workers_per_gather for a per-Gather limit.  It's slightly
annoying that we may end up renaming the latter GUC, but not as
annoying as spending another three weeks debating this and missing
beta2.

-- 
Robert Haas
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