DESCRIPTION: Distribute Types to worker nodes
When to propagate
==============
There are two logical moments that types could be distributed to the worker nodes
- When they get used ( just in time distribution )
- When they get created ( proactive distribution )
The just in time distribution follows the model used by how schema's get created right before we are going to create a table in that schema, for types this would be when the table uses a type as its column.
The proactive distribution is suitable for situations where it is benificial to have the type on the worker nodes directly. They can later on be used in queries where an intermediate result gets created with a cast to this type.
Just in time creation is always the last resort, you cannot create a distributed table before the type gets created. A good example use case is; you have an existing postgres server that needs to scale out. By adding the citus extension, add some nodes to the cluster, and distribute the table. The type got created before citus existed. There was no moment where citus could have propagated the creation of a type.
Proactive is almost always a good option. Types are not resource intensive objects, there is no performance overhead of having 100's of types. If you want to use them in a query to represent an intermediate result (which happens in our test suite) they just work.
There is however a moment when proactive type distribution is not beneficial; in transactions where the type is used in a distributed table.
Lets assume the following transaction:
```sql
BEGIN;
CREATE TYPE tt1 AS (a int, b int);
CREATE TABLE t1 AS (a int PRIMARY KEY, b tt1);
SELECT create_distributed_table('t1', 'a');
\copy t1 FROM bigdata.csv
```
Types are node scoped objects; meaning the type exists once per worker. Shards however have best performance when they are created over their own connection. For the type to be visible on all connections it needs to be created and committed before we try to create the shards. Here the just in time situation is most beneficial and follows how we create schema's on the workers. Outside of a transaction block we will just use 1 connection to propagate the creation.
How propagation works
=================
Just in time
-----------
Just in time propagation hooks into the infrastructure introduced in #2882. It adds types as a supported object in `SupportedDependencyByCitus`. This will make sure that any object being distributed by citus that depends on types will now cascade into types. When types are depending them self on other objects they will get created first.
Creation later works by getting the ddl commands to create the object by its `ObjectAddress` in `GetDependencyCreateDDLCommands` which will dispatch types to `CreateTypeDDLCommandsIdempotent`.
For the correct walking of the graph we follow array types, when later asked for the ddl commands for array types we return `NIL` (empty list) which makes that the object will not be recorded as distributed, (its an internal type, dependant on the user type).
Proactive distribution
---------------------
When the user creates a type (composite or enum) we will have a hook running in `multi_ProcessUtility` after the command has been applied locally. Running after running locally makes that we already have an `ObjectAddress` for the type. This is required to mark the type as being distributed.
Keeping the type up to date
====================
For types that are recorded in `pg_dist_object` (eg. `IsObjectDistributed` returns true for the `ObjectAddress`) we will intercept the utility commands that alter the type.
- `AlterTableStmt` with `relkind` set to `OBJECT_TYPE` encapsulate changes to the fields of a composite type.
- `DropStmt` with removeType set to `OBJECT_TYPE` encapsulate `DROP TYPE`.
- `AlterEnumStmt` encapsulates changes to enum values.
Enum types can not be changed transactionally. When the execution on a worker fails a warning will be shown to the user the propagation was incomplete due to worker communication failure. An idempotent command is shown for the user to re-execute when the worker communication is fixed.
Keeping types up to date is done via the executor. Before the statement is executed locally we create a plan on how to apply it on the workers. This plan is executed after we have applied the statement locally.
All changes to types need to be done in the same transaction for types that have already been distributed and will fail with an error if parallel queries have already been executed in the same transaction. Much like foreign keys to reference tables.
Before this commit, we've recorded the relation accesses in 3 different
places
- FindPlacementListConnection -- applies all executor in tx block
- StartPlacementExecutionOnSession() -- adaptive executor only
- StartPlacementListConnection() -- router/real-time only
This is different than Citus 8.2, and could lead to query execution times
increase considerably on multi-shard commands in transaction block
that are on partitioned tables.
Benchmarks:
```
1+8 c5.4xlarge cluster
Empty distributed partitioned table with 365 partitions: https://gist.github.com/onderkalaci/1edace4ed6bd6f061c8a15594865bb51#file-partitions_365-sql
./pgbench -f /tmp/multi_shard.sql -c10 -j10 -P 1 -T 120 postgres://citus:w3r6KLJpv3mxe9E-NIUeJw@c.fy5fkjcv45vcepaogqcaskmmkee.db.citusdata.com:5432/citus?sslmode=require
cat /tmp/multi_shard.sql
BEGIN;
DELETE FROM collections_list;
DELETE FROM collections_list;
DELETE FROM collections_list;
COMMIT;
cat /tmp/single_shard.sql
BEGIN;
DELETE FROM collections_list WHERE key = :aid;
DELETE FROM collections_list WHERE key = :aid;
DELETE FROM collections_list WHERE key = :aid;
COMMIT;
cat /tmp/mix.sql
BEGIN;
DELETE FROM collections_list WHERE key = :aid;
DELETE FROM collections_list WHERE key = :aid;
DELETE FROM collections_list WHERE key = :aid;
DELETE FROM collections_list;
DELETE FROM collections_list;
DELETE FROM collections_list;
COMMIT;
```
The table shows `latency average` of pgbench runs explained above, so we have a pretty solid improvement even over 8.2.2.
| Test | Citus 8.2.2 | Citus 8.3.1 | Citus 8.3.2 (this branch) | Citus 8.3.1 (FKEYs disabled via GUC) |
| ------------- | ------------- | ------------- |------------- | ------------- |
|multi_shard | 2370.083 ms |3605.040 ms |1324.094 ms |1247.255 ms |
| single_shard | 85.338 ms |120.934 ms |73.216 ms | 78.765 ms |
| mix | 2434.459 ms | 3727.080 ms |1306.456 ms | 1280.326 ms |
Instead of scattering the code around, we move all the
logic into a single function.
This will help supporting foreign keys to reference tables
in the unified executor with a single line of change, just
calling this function.
When a hash distributed table have a foreign key to a reference
table, there are few restrictions we have to apply in order to
prevent distributed deadlocks or reading wrong results.
The necessity to apply the restrictions arise from cascading
nature of foreign keys. When a foreign key on a reference table
cascades to a distributed table, a single operation over a single
connection can acquire locks on multiple shards of the distributed
table. Thus, any parallel operation on that distributed table, in the
same transaction should not open parallel connections to the shards.
Otherwise, we'd either end-up with a self-distributed deadlock or
read wrong results.
As briefly described above, the restrictions that we apply is done
by tracking the distributed/reference relation accesses inside
transaction blocks, and act accordingly when necessary.
The two main rules are as follows:
- Whenever a parallel distributed relation access conflicts
with a consecutive reference relation access, Citus errors
out
- Whenever a reference relation access is followed by a
conflicting parallel relation access, the execution mode
is switched to sequential mode.
There are also some other notes to mention:
- If the user does SET LOCAL citus.multi_shard_modify_mode
TO 'sequential';, all the queries should simply work with
using one connection per worker and sequentially executing
the commands. That's obviously a slower approach than Citus'
usual parallel execution. However, we've at least have a way
to run all commands successfully.
- If an unrelated parallel query executed on any distributed
table, we cannot switch to sequential mode. Because, the essense
of sequential mode is using one connection per worker. However,
in the presence of a parallel connection, the connection manager
picks those connections to execute the commands. That contradicts
with our purpose, thus we error out.
- COPY to a distributed table cannot be executed in sequential mode.
Thus, if we switch to sequential mode and COPY is executed, the
operation fails and there is currently no way of implementing that.
Note that, when the local table is not empty and create_distributed_table
is used, citus uses COPY internally. Thus, in those cases,
create_distributed_table() will also fail.
- There is a GUC called citus.enforce_foreign_key_restrictions
to disable all the checks. We added that GUC since the restrictions
we apply is sometimes a bit more restrictive than its necessary.
The user might want to relax those. Similarly, if you don't have
CASCADEing reference tables, you might consider disabling all the
checks.
Jelte Fennema
SaitTalhaNisanci
Nils Dijk
Hadi Moshayedi
Onder Kalaci
Marco Slot