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
SaitTalhaNisanci