Re: The plan for FDW-based sharding - Mailing list pgsql-hackers
From | Robert Haas |
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Subject | Re: The plan for FDW-based sharding |
Date | |
Msg-id | CA+TgmoacxkktW-y-tCJnTG7N3OwkTdo1eziAuU+w9=oObyOO4w@mail.gmail.com Whole thread Raw |
In response to | Re: The plan for FDW-based sharding (Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com>) |
Responses |
Re: The plan for FDW-based sharding
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List | pgsql-hackers |
On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 11:17 PM, Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com> wrote: > If FDW-based sharding works, I'm happy enough, I have no horse in this race. > If it doesn't work I don't much care either. What I'm worried about is it if > works like partitioning using inheritance works - horribly badly, but just > well enough that it's served as an effective barrier to doing anything > better. > > That's what I want to prevent. Sharding that only-just-works and then stops > us getting anything better into core. That's a reasonable worry. Thanks for articulating it so clearly. I've thought about that issue and I admit it's both real and serious, but I've sort of taken the attitude of saying, well, I don't know how to solve that problem, but there's so much other important work that needs to be done before we get to the point where that's the blocker that solving that problem doesn't seem like the most important thing right now. The sharding discussion we had in Vienna convinced me that, in the long run, having PostgreSQL servers talk to other PostgreSQL servers only using SQL is not going to be a winner. I believe Postgres-XL has already done something about that; I think it is passing plans around directly. So you could look at that and say - ha, the FDW approach is a dead end! But from my point of view, the important thing about the FDW interface is that it provides a pluggable interface to the planner. We can now push down joins and sorts; hopefully soon we will be able to push down aggregates and limits and so on. That's the hard part. The deparsing code that turns the plan we want to execute in to an SQL query that can be shipped over the wire is a detail. Serializing some other on-the-wire representation of what we want the remote side to do is small potatoes compared to having all of the logic that lets you decide, in the first instance, what you want the remote side to do. I can imagine, in the long term, adding a new sub-protocol (probably mediated via COPY BOTH) that uses a different and more expressive on-the-wire representation. Another foreseeable problem with the FDW approach is that you might want to have a hash-partitioned table where there are multiple copies of each piece data and they are spread out across the shards and you can add and remove shards and the data automatically rebalances. Table inheritance (or table partitioning) + postgres_fdw doesn't sound so great in this situation because when you rebalance you need to change the partitioning constraints and that requires a full table lock on every node and the whole thing seems likely to end up being somewhat annoyingly manual and overly constrained by locking. But I'd say two things about that. The first is that I honestly think that this would be a pretty nice problem to have. If we had things working well enough that this was the kind of problem we were trying to tackle, we'd be light-years ahead of where we are today. Sure, everybody hates table inheritance, but I don't think it's right to say that partitioning work is blocked because table inheritance exists: I think the problem is that getting true table partitioning correct is *hard*. And Amit Langote is working on that and hopefully we will get there, but it's not an easy problem. I don't think sharding is an easy problem either, and I think getting to a point where ease-of-use is our big limiting factor would actually be better than the current scenario where "it doesn't work at all" is the limiting factor. I don't want that to *block* other approaches, BUT I also think that anybody who tries to start over from scratch and ignore all the good work that has been done in FDW-land is not going to have a very fun time. The second thing I want to say about this problem is that I don't want to presume that it's not a *solvable* problem. Just because we use the FDW technology as a base doesn't mean we can't invent new and quite different stuff along the way. One idea I've been toying with is trying to create some notion of a "distributed" table. This would be a new relkind. You'd have a single relation at the SQL level, not an inheritance hierarchy, but under the hood the data would be spread across a bunch of remote servers using the FDW interface. So then you reuse all of the query planner work and other enhancements that have been put into the FDW stuff, but you'd present a much cleaner user interface. Or, maybe better, you could create a new FDW, sharding_fdw, that works like postgres_fdw except that instead of putting the data on one particular foreign server, it spreads the data out across multiple servers and manages the sharding process under the hood. That would, again, let you reuse a lot of the work that's been done to improve the FDW infrastructure while creating something significantly more powerful than what postgres_fdw is today. I don't know, I don't have any ideas about this. I think your concern is valid, and I share it. But I just fundamentally believe that it's better to enhance what we have than to start inventing totally new abstractions. The FDW API is *really* powerful, and getting more powerful, and I just have a very hard time believing that starting over will be better. Somebody can do that if they like and I'm not gonna get in the way, but if it's got problems that could have been avoided by basing that same work on the FDW stuff we've already got, I do plan to point that out. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
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