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.
Onder Kalaci