The original Gather code failed to mark a Gather node as not able to
do projection, but it couldn't, even though it did call initialize its
projection info via ExecAssignProjectionInfo. There doesn't seem to
be any good reason for this node not to have projection capability,
so clean things up so that it does. Without this, plans using Gather
nodes might need to carry extra Result nodes to do projection.
In the previous coding, before returning from ExecutorRun, we'd shut
down all parallel workers. This was dead wrong if ExecutorRun was
called with a non-zero tuple count; it had the effect of truncating
the query output. To fix, give ExecutePlan control over whether to
enter parallel mode, and have it refuse to do so if the tuple count
is non-zero. Rewrite the Gather logic so that it can cope with being
called outside parallel mode.
Commit 7aea8e4f2daa4b39ca9d1309a0c4aadb0f7ed81b is largely to blame
for this problem, though this patch modifies some subsequently-committed
code which relied on the guarantees it purported to make.
A Gather executor node runs any number of copies of a plan in an equal
number of workers and merges all of the results into a single tuple
stream. It can also run the plan itself, if the workers are
unavailable or haven't started up yet. It is intended to work with
the Partial Seq Scan node which will be added in future commits.
It could also be used to implement parallel query of a different sort
by itself, without help from Partial Seq Scan, if the single_copy mode
is used. In that mode, a worker executes the plan, and the parallel
leader does not, merely collecting the worker's results. So, a Gather
node could be inserted into a plan to split the execution of that plan
across two processes. Nested Gather nodes aren't currently supported,
but we might want to add support for that in the future.
There's nothing in the planner to actually generate Gather nodes yet,
so it's not quite time to break out the champagne. But we're getting
close.
Amit Kapila. Some designs suggestions were provided by me, and I also
reviewed the patch. Single-copy mode, documentation, and other minor
changes also by me.
