Re: generic plans and "initial" pruning

Amit Langote <amitlangote09@gmail.com>

From: Amit Langote <amitlangote09@gmail.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, Jacob Champion <jchampion@timescale.com>, David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2023-01-20T03:52:07Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 12:31 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Amit Langote <amitlangote09@gmail.com> writes:
> > On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 4:39 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> >> I had what felt like an epiphany: the whole problem arises because the
> >> system is wrongly factored.  We should get rid of AcquireExecutorLocks
> >> altogether, allowing the plancache to hand back a generic plan that
> >> it's not certain of the validity of, and instead integrate the
> >> responsibility for acquiring locks into executor startup.
>
> > Interesting.  The current implementation relies on
> > PlanCacheRelCallback() marking a generic CachedPlan as invalid, so
> > perhaps there will have to be some sharing of state between the
> > plancache and the executor for this to work?
>
> Yeah.  Thinking a little harder, I think this would have to involve
> passing a CachedPlan pointer to the executor, and what the executor
> would do after acquiring each lock is to ask the plancache "hey, do
> you still think this CachedPlan entry is valid?".  In the case where
> there's a problem, the AcceptInvalidationMessages call involved in
> lock acquisition would lead to a cache inval that clears the validity
> flag on the CachedPlan entry, and this would provide an inexpensive
> way to check if that happened.

OK, thanks, this is useful.

> It might be possible to incorporate this pointer into PlannedStmt
> instead of passing it separately.

Yeah, that would be less churn.  Though, I wonder if you still hold
that PlannedStmt should not be scribbled upon outside the planner as
you said upthread [1]?

> >> * In a successfully built execution state tree, there will simply
> >> not be any nodes corresponding to pruned-away, never-locked subplans.
>
> > I think this is true with the patch as proposed too, but I was still a
> > bit worried about what an ExecutorStart_hook may be doing with an
> > uninitialized plan tree.  Maybe we're mandating that the hook must
> > call standard_ExecutorStart() and only work with the finished
> > PlanState tree?
>
> It would certainly be incumbent on any such hook to not touch
> not-yet-locked parts of the plan tree.  I'm not particularly concerned
> about that sort of requirements change, because we'd be breaking APIs
> all through this area in any case.

OK.  Perhaps something that should be documented around ExecutorStart().

> >> * In some cases (views, at least) we need to acquire lock on relations
> >> that aren't directly reflected anywhere in the plan tree.  So there'd
> >> have to be a separate mechanism for getting those locks and rechecking
> >> validity afterward.  A list of relevant relation OIDs might be enough
> >> for that.
>
> > Hmm, a list of only the OIDs wouldn't preserve the lock mode,
>
> Good point.  I wonder if we could integrate this with the
> RTEPermissionInfo data structure?

You mean adding a rellockmode field to RTEPermissionInfo?

> > Would you like me to hack up a PoC or are you already on that?
>
> I'm not planning to work on this myself, I was hoping you would.

Alright, I'll try to get something out early next week.  Thanks for
all the pointers.

-- 
Thanks, Amit Langote
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/922566.1648784745%40sss.pgh.pa.us



Commits

  1. Stamp 19beta1.

  2. Revert "Don't lock partitions pruned by initial pruning"

  3. Ensure first ModifyTable rel initialized if all are pruned

  4. Fix bug in cbc127917 to handle nested Append correctly

  5. Remove unstable test suite added by 525392d57

  6. Don't lock partitions pruned by initial pruning

  7. Fix an oversight in cbc127917 to handle MERGE correctly

  8. Track unpruned relids to avoid processing pruned relations

  9. Perform runtime initial pruning outside ExecInitNode()

  10. Move PartitionPruneInfo out of plan nodes into PlannedStmt

  11. Fix setrefs.c's failure to do expression processing on prune steps.

  12. Remove obsolete executor cleanup code

  13. Revert "Move PartitionPruneInfo out of plan nodes into PlannedStmt"

  14. Move PartitioPruneInfo out of plan nodes into PlannedStmt

  15. Refactor and cleanup runtime partition prune code a little

  16. Remove some unnecessary fields from Plan trees.

  17. Remove more redundant relation locking during executor startup.

  18. Shut down Gather's children before shutting down Gather itself.