Re: Parallel Seq Scan

I've also been thinking about how, instead of having to have a special PartialSeqScan node which contains a bunch of code to store tuples in a shared memory queue, could we not have a "TupleBuffer", or "ParallelTupleReader" node, one of which would always be the root node of a plan branch that's handed off to a worker process. This node would just try to keep it's shared tuple store full, and perhaps once it fills it could have a bit of a sleep and be woken up when there's a bit more space on the queue. When no more tuples were available from the node below this, then the worker could exit. (providing there was no rescan required)

I think between the Funnel node and a ParallelTupleReader we could actually parallelise plans that don't even have parallel safe nodes.... Let me explain:

Let's say we have a 4 way join, and the join order must be {a,b}, {c,d} => {a,b,c,d}, Assuming the cost of joining a to b and c to d are around the same, the Parallelizer may notice this and decide to inject a Funnel and then ParallelTupleReader just below the node for c join d and have c join d in parallel. Meanwhile the main worker process could be executing the root node, as normal. This way the main worker wouldn't have to go to the trouble of joining c to d itself as the worker would have done all that hard work.

I know the current patch is still very early in the evolution of PostgreSQL's parallel query, but how would that work with the current method of selecting which parts of the plan to parallelise?

I really think the plan needs to be a complete plan before it can be best analysed on how to divide the workload between workers, and also, it would be quite useful to know how many workers are going to be able to lend a hand in order to know best how to divide the plan up as evenly as possible.