Parallel Sequential Scan is Committed!

I previously suggested that we might be able to get parallel sequential scan committed to PostgreSQL 9.5.  That did not happen.  However, I'm pleased to report that I've just committed the first version of parallel sequential scan to PostgreSQL's master branch, with a view toward having it included in the upcoming PostgreSQL 9.6 release.

Planning Parallel and Distributed Queries

I have been somewhat lax about blogging for the last six months or so due to having been even busier than usual with various projects, and I think that's likely to continue for at least the next month or two as I work to finish the first version of parallel query for PostgreSQL.  If you have been following the PostgreSQL commit log recently, you will have noticed many new commits building up towards that goal.

However, I wanted to take a minute to point out the presentation that I did yesterday at 2015.pgconf.eu, which I have now uploaded to my presentations web site.  The title of the presentation is "Planning Parallel and Distributed Queries".  If you have not closely followed the development of parallel query, you might find this presentation interesting to review, because it gives examples of the types of query plans I hope that PostgreSQL will be able to generate in the future.

(Everything in the talk represents future work ... and not all of it will be in 9.6!)

PostgreSQL Shutdown

PostgreSQL has three shutdown modes: smart, fast, and immediate.  For many years, the default has been "smart", but Bruce Momjian has just committed a patch to change the default to "fast" for PostgreSQL 9.5.  In my opinion, this is a good thing; I have complained about the current, and agreed with others complaining about it, many times, at least as far back as December of 2010.  Fortunately, we now seem to have now achieved consensus on this change.

Parallel Sequential Scan for PostgreSQL 9.5

Amit Kapila and I have been working very hard to make parallel sequential scan ready to commit to PostgreSQL 9.5.  It is not all there yet, but we are making very good progress.  I'm very grateful to everyone in the PostgreSQL community who has helped us with review and testing, and I hope that more people will join the effort.  Getting a feature of this size and complexity completed is obviously a huge undertaking, and a significant amount of work remains to be done.  Not a whole lot of brand-new code remains to be written, I hope, but there are known issues with the existing patches where we need to improve the code, and I'm sure there are also bugs we haven't found yet.