We prefer the background daemon to only sync node metadata. That's
why we move placement metadata changes from disable node to
activate node. With that, we can make sure that disable node
only changes node metadata, whereas activate node syncs all
the metadata changes. In essence, we already expect all
nodes to be up when a node is activated. So, this does not change
the behavior much.
As of master branch, Citus does all the modifications to replicated tables
(e.g., reference tables and distributed tables with replication factor > 1),
via 2PC and avoids any shardstate=3. As a side-effect of those changes,
handling node failures for replicated tables change.
With this PR, when one (or multiple) node failures happen, the users would
see query errors on modifications. If the problem is intermitant, that's OK,
once the node failure(s) recover by themselves, the modification queries would
succeed. If the node failure(s) are permenant, the users should call
`SELECT citus_disable_node(...)` to disable the node. As soon as the node is
disabled, modification would start to succeed. However, now the old node gets
behind. It means that, when the node is up again, the placements should be
re-created on the node. First, use `SELECT citus_activate_node()`. Then, use
`SELECT replicate_table_shards(...)` to replicate the missing placements on
the re-activated node.
Onder Kalaci