With PG13 heap_* (heap_open, heap_close etc) are replaced with table_*
(table_open, table_close etc).
It is better to use the new table access methods in the codebase and
define the macros for the previous versions as we can easily remove the
macro without having to change the codebase when we drop the support for
the old version.
Commits that introduced this change on Postgres:
f25968c49697db673f6cd2a07b3f7626779f1827
e0c4ec07284db817e1f8d9adfb3fffc952252db0
4b21acf522d751ba5b6679df391d5121b6c4a35f
Command to see relevant commits on Postgres side:
git log --all --grep="heap_open"
We have two variables that are related to local execution status.
TransactionAccessedLocalPlacement and
TransactionConnectedToLocalGroup. Only one of these fields should be
set, however we didn't have any check for this contraint and it was
error prone.
What those two variables are used is that we are trying to understand if
we should use local execution, the current session, or if we should be
using a connection to execute the current query, therefore the tasks. In
the enum, now it is more clear what these variables mean.
Also, now we have a method to change the local execution status. The
method will error if we are trying to transition from a state to a wrong
state. This will help us avoid problems.
We have special logic to copy into intermediate results and we use a
custom format for that, "result" copy format. Postgres internally does
not know this format and if we use this locally it will error saying
that it does not know this format.
Files are visible to all transactions, which means that we can use any
connection to access files. In order to use the existing logic, it makes
sense that in case we have intermediate results, which means we will
write the results to a file, we preserve the same behavior, which is
opening connections to localhost. Therefore if we have intermediate
results we return false in ShouldExecuteCopyLocally.
We can use local copy in INSERT..SELECT, so the check that disables
local execution is removed.
Also a test for local copy where the data size >
LOCAL_COPY_FLUSH_THRESHOLD is added.
use local execution with insert..select
A copy will be executed locally if
- Local execution is enabled and current transaction accessed a local placement
- Local execution is enabled and we are inside a transaction block.
So even if local execution is enabled but we are not in a transaction block, the copy will not be run locally.
This will not run locally:
```
COPY distributed_table FROM STDIN;
....
```
This will run locally:
```
SET citus.enable_local_execution to 'on';
BEGIN;
COPY distributed_table FROM STDIN;
COMMIT;
....
```
.
There are 3 ways to do a copy in postgres programmatically:
- from a file
- from a program
- from a callback function
I have chosen to implement it with a callback function, which means that we write the rows of copy from a callback function to the output buffer, which is used to insert tuples into the actual table.
For each shard id, we have a buffer that keeps the current rows to be written, we perform the actual copy operation either when:
- copy buffer for the given shard id reaches to a threshold, which is currently 512KB
- we reach to the end of the copy
The buffer size is debatable(512KB). At a given time, we might allocate (local placement * buffer size) memory at most.
The local copy uses the same copy format as remote copy, which means that we serialize the data in the same format as remote copy and send it locally.
There was also the option to use ExecSimpleRelationInsert to insert
slots one by one, which would avoid the extra
serialization/deserialization but doing some benchmarks it seems that
using buffers are significantly better in terms of the performance.
You can see this comment for more details: https://github.com/citusdata/citus/pull/3557#discussion_r389499054
Sait Talha Nisanci
Onur Tirtir