Re: ALTER TABLE ADD FOREIGN KEY to partitioned table, is not parallelized

On Wed, 4 Jun 2025, Frédéric Yhuel wrote:

> On 6/3/25 17:34, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
>>  The backend process for each of the above ALTER TABLE commands, does not
>>     parallelize the foreign key checks for the different partitions. I
>>     know, because in the logs I see gigabytes of temporary files being
>>     written, with the CONTEXT showing queries issued incrementally on
>>     all the different partitions:
>>
>>    :LOG:      temporary file: path "pg_tblspc/16390/PG_17_202406281/
>>  pgsql_tmp/pgsql_tmp3363462.579", size 1073741824
>>    :CONTEXT:  SQL statement "SELECT fk."columnX" FROM ONLY
>>  "public"."table_partition_214" fk
>>                LEFT OUTER JOIN ONLY "public"."another_table" pk
>>                    ON ( pk."columnX" OPERATOR(pg_catalog.=) fk."columnX")
>>                WHERE pk."columnX" IS NULL AND (fk."columnX" IS NOT NULL)"
>>
>>     Why can't the backend issue these queries in parallel workers?
>
> This has been discussed here: 
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/0d21e3b4-dcde-290c-875e-6ed5013e8e52%40dalibo.com
>
> Perhaps we should exhume this patch, but I believe the optimal strategy is to 
> perform a VACUUM between the data and post-data to build the visibility map. 
> The anti-join can then use an efficient index-only scan.

Thanks for pointing to this patch.
Since I run each of the pg_restore sections separately, I will try to 
manually do a VACUUM after the "data" and before the "post-data" section.

In general I have noticed most operations are slower after a succesful 
pg_restore until VACUUM is complete, which is unfortunate as the database 
is huge and it takes days to run. Something I have on my list to try, is 
whether a COPY FREEZE would alleviate all this trouble, since all tuples 
are immediately visible then. Maybe a patch for a new pg_restore 
option --freeze is a better solution. Are my assumptions right?

Thanks,
Dimitris