On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 6:44 PM, Andres Freund <
andres@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> On 2015-02-18 16:59:26 +0530, Amit Kapila wrote:
>
> > There could be some cases where it could be beneficial for worker
> > to process a sub-tree, but I think there will be more cases where
> > it will just work on a part of node and send the result back to either
> > master backend or another worker for further processing.
>
> I think many parallelism projects start out that way, and then notice
> that it doesn't parallelize very efficiently.
>
> The most extreme example, but common, is aggregation over large amounts
> of data - unless you want to ship huge amounts of data between processes
> eto parallize it you have to do the sequential scan and the
> pre-aggregate step (that e.g. selects count() and sum() to implement a
> avg over all the workers) inside one worker.
>
OTOH if someone wants to parallelize scan (including expensive qual) and
sort then it will be better to perform scan (or part of scan by one worker)
and sort by other worker.