The file handling the utility functions (DDL) for citus organically grew over time and became unreasonably large. This refactor takes that file and refactored the functionality into separate files per command. Initially modeled after the directory and file layout that can be found in postgres.
Although the size of the change is quite big there are barely any code changes. Only one two functions have been added for readability purposes:
- PostProcessIndexStmt which is extracted from PostProcessUtility
- PostProcessAlterTableStmt which is extracted from multi_ProcessUtility
A README.md has been added to `src/backend/distributed/commands` describing the contents of the module and every file in the module.
We need more documentation around the overloading of the COPY command, for now the boilerplate has been added for people with better knowledge to fill out.
Drop schema command fails in mx mode if there
is a partitioned table with active partitions.
This is due to fact that sql drop trigger receives
all the dropped objects including partitions. When
we call drop table on parent partition, it also drops
the partitions on the mx node. This causes the drop
table command on partitions to fail on mx node because
they are already dropped when the partition parent was
dropped.
With this work we did not require the table to exist on
worker_drop_distributed_table.
With this commit, we all partitioned distributed tables with
replication factor > 1. However, we also have many restrictions.
In summary, we disallow all kinds of modifications (including DDLs)
on the partition tables. Instead, the user is allowed to run the
modifications over the parent table.
The necessity for such a restriction have two aspects:
- We need to acquire shard resource locks appropriately
- We need to handle marking partitions INVALID in case
of any failures. Note that, in theory, the parent table
should also become INVALID, which is too aggressive.
We acquire distributed lock on all mx nodes for truncated
tables before actually doing truncate operation.
This is needed for distributed serialization of the truncate
command without causing a deadlock.
This commit uses *_walker instead of *_mutator for performance reasons.
Given that we're only updating a functionId in the tree, the approach
seems fine.
In the distributed deadlock detection design, we concluded that prepared transactions
cannot be part of a distributed deadlock. The idea is that (a) when the transaction
is prepared it already acquires all the locks, so cannot be part of a deadlock
(b) even if some other processes blocked on the prepared transaction, prepared transactions
would eventually be committed (or rollbacked) and the system will continue operating.
With the above in mind, we probably had a mistake in terms of memory allocations. For each
backend initialized, we keep a `BackendData` struct. The bug we've introduced is that, we
assumed there would only be `MaxBackend` number of backends. However, `MaxBackends` doesn't
include the prepared transactions and axuliary processes. When you check Postgres' InitProcGlobal`
you'd see that `TotalProcs = MaxBackends + NUM_AUXILIARY_PROCS + max_prepared_xacts;`
This commit aligns with total procs processed with that.
With this commit, we implement two views that are very similar
to pg_stat_activity, but showing queries that are involved in
distributed queries:
- citus_dist_stat_activity: Shows all the distributed queries
- citus_worker_stat_activity: Shows all the queries on the shards
that are initiated by distributed queries.
Both views have the same columns in the outputs. In very basic terms, both of the views
are meant to provide some useful insights about the distributed
transactions within the cluster. As the names reveal, both views are similar to pg_stat_activity.
Also note that these views can be pretty useful on Citus MX clusters.
Note that when the views are queried from the worker nodes, they'd not show the distributed
transactions that are initiated from the coordinator node. The reason is that the worker
nodes do not know the host/port of the coordinator. Thus, it is advisable to query the
views from the coordinator.
If we bucket the columns that the views returns, we'd end up with the following:
- Hostnames and ports:
- query_hostname, query_hostport: The node that the query is running
- master_query_host_name, master_query_host_port: The node in the cluster
initiated the query.
Note that for citus_dist_stat_activity view, the query_hostname-query_hostport
is always the same with master_query_host_name-master_query_host_port. The
distinction is mostly relevant for citus_worker_stat_activity. For example,
on Citus MX, a users starts a transaction on Node-A, which starts worker
transactions on Node-B and Node-C. In that case, the query hostnames would be
Node-B and Node-C whereas the master_query_host_name would Node-A.
- Distributed transaction related things:
This is mostly the process_id, distributed transactionId and distributed transaction
number.
- pg_stat_activity columns:
These two views get all the columns from pg_stat_activity. We're basically joining
pg_stat_activity with get_all_active_transactions on process_id.
We previously implemented OTHER_WORKERS_WITH_METADATA tag. However,
that was wrong. See the related discussion:
https://github.com/citusdata/citus/issues/2320
Instead, we switched using OTHER_WORKER_NODES and make the command
that we're running optional such that even if the node is not a
metadata node, we won't be in trouble.
This commit enables support for TRUNCATE on both
distributed table and reference tables.
The basic idea is to acquire lock on the relation by sending
the TRUNCATE command to all metedata worker nodes. We only
skip sending the TRUNCATE command to the node that actually
executus the command to prevent a self-distributed-deadlock.
This commit by default enables hiding shard names on MX workers
by simple replacing `pg_table_is_visible()` calls with
`citus_table_is_visible()` calls on the MX worker nodes. The latter
function filters out tables that are known to be shards.
The main motivation of this change is a better UX. The functionality
can be opted out via a GUC.
We also added two views, namely citus_shards_on_worker and
citus_shard_indexes_on_worker such that users can query
them to see the shards and their corresponding indexes.
We also added debug messages such that the filtered tables can
be interactively seen by setting the level to DEBUG1.
Add ability to understand whether a table is a
known shard on MX workers. Note that this is only useful
and applicable for hiding shards on MX worker nodes given
that we can have metadata only there.
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.
-[x] drop constraint
-[x] drop column
-[x] alter column type
-[x] truncate
are sequentialized if there is a foreign constraint from
a distributed table to a reference table on the affected relations
by the above commands.
Make sure that intermediate results use a connection that is
not associated with any placement. That is useful in two ways:
- More complex queries can be executed with CTEs
- Safely use the same connections when there is a foreign key
to reference table from a distributed table, which needs to
use the same connection for modifications since the reference
table might cascade to the distributed table.