In plain words, each distributed plan pulls the necessary intermediate
results to the worker nodes that the plan hits. This is primarily useful
in three ways.
(i) If the distributed plan that uses intermediate
result(s) is a router query, then the intermediate results are only
broadcasted to a single node.
(ii) If a distributed plan consists of only intermediate results, which
is not uncommon, the intermediate results are broadcasted to a single
node only.
(iii) If a distributed query hits a sub-set of the shards in multiple
workers, the intermediate results will be broadcasted to the relevant
node(s).
The final item (iii) becomes crucial for append/range distributed
tables where typically the distributed queries hit a small subset of
shards/workers.
To do this, for each query that Citus creates a distributed plan, we keep
track of the subPlans used in the queryTree, and save it in the distributed
plan. Just before Citus executes each subPlan, Citus first keeps track of
every worker node that the distributed plan hits, and marks every subPlan
should be broadcasted to these nodes. Later, for each subPlan which is a
distributed plan, Citus does this operation recursively since these
distributed plans may access to different subPlans, and those have to be
recorded as well.
Hanefi Onaldi