12c pq_replicate

One of the changes that appeared in 12c was a change to the broadcast distribution option for parallel execution. I mentioned this in a footnote to a longer article a couple of months ago; this note simply expands on that brief comment with an example. We’ll start with a simple two-table hash join – which I’ll first construct and demonstrate in 11.2.0.4:

rem
rem     Script: pq_replicate.sql
rem     Dated:  March 2014
rem     Author: J P Lewis
rem

create table t1
as
with generator as (
        select  --+ materialize
                rownum  id
        from    all_objects
        where   rownum <= 3000
)
select
        rownum                          n1,
        lpad(rownum,6,'0')              small_vc,
        lpad(rownum,200,'0')            padding
from
        generator       v1,
        generator       v2
where
        rownum <= 1000
;

create table t2
as
with generator as (
        select  --+ materialize
                rownum  id
        from    all_objects
        where   rownum <= 3000
)
select
        1 + mod(rownum,10000)                   n1,
        lpad(1 + mod(rownum,10000),6,'0')       small_vc,
        lpad(rownum,500,'0')                    padding
from
        generator       v1,
        generator       v2
where
        rownum <= 20000 ;

-- collect stats, no histograms.

select
        /*+
                leading(t1 t2)
                parallel(t1 2)
                parallel(t2 2)
                use_hash(t2)
        */
        t1.padding,
        t2.padding
from    t1, t2
where   t2.n1 = t1.n1
and     t2.small_vc = t1.small_vc
;

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation               | Name     | Rows  | Bytes | Cost  |    TQ  |IN-OUT| PQ Distrib |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT        |          |  1000 |   707K|   135 |        |      |            |
|   1 |  PX COORDINATOR         |          |       |       |       |        |      |            |
|   2 |   PX SEND QC (RANDOM)   | :TQ10001 |  1000 |   707K|   135 |  Q1,01 | P->S | QC (RAND)  |
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN            |          |  1000 |   707K|   135 |  Q1,01 | PCWP |            |
|   4 |     PX RECEIVE          |          |  1000 |   207K|     4 |  Q1,01 | PCWP |            |
|   5 |      PX SEND BROADCAST  | :TQ10000 |  1000 |   207K|     4 |  Q1,00 | P->P | BROADCAST  |
|   6 |       PX BLOCK ITERATOR |          |  1000 |   207K|     4 |  Q1,00 | PCWC |            |
|   7 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL| T1       |  1000 |   207K|     4 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |
|   8 |     PX BLOCK ITERATOR   |          | 20000 |     9M|   131 |  Q1,01 | PCWC |            |
|   9 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL  | T2       | 20000 |     9M|   131 |  Q1,01 | PCWP |            |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In this plan slave set 2 scans table t1 in parallel and broadcasts the result set to slave set 1 (lines 5 – 7). The significance of the broadcast option is that each slave in slave set 2 sends all the rows it has read to every slave in slave set 1. For a fairly large table with a high degree of parallelism this could be a lot of inter-process communication; the total number of rows passing through the PX message pool is “DOP x number of rows filtered from t1”.

After a slave in slave set 1 has receive the whole of the t1 result set it builds an in-memory hash table and starts scanning rowid ranges (PX BLOCK ITERATOR) from table t2 probing the in-memory hash table to effect the join (lines 3,4, 8,9). Since each slave has a copy of the whole result set from t1 it can scan any chunk of t2 and handle the contents locally. Moreover because slave set 1 isn’t reading its second input from a virtual table it is able to write its output immediately to the virtual table (:TQ10001) that feeds the query coordinator with the result (lines 1,2) – so we haven’t had to do a “hash join buffered” operation and buffer the entire second input before starting to execute the join.

So how does 12c change things. With the same starting data and query, here’s the execution plan:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation             | Name     | Rows  | Bytes | Cost  |    TQ  |IN-OUT| PQ Distrib |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT      |          |  1000 |   707K|   135 |        |      |            |
|   1 |  PX COORDINATOR       |          |       |       |       |        |      |            |
|   2 |   PX SEND QC (RANDOM) | :TQ10000 |  1000 |   707K|   135 |  Q1,00 | P->S | QC (RAND)  |
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN          |          |  1000 |   707K|   135 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |
|   4 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL | T1       |  1000 |   207K|     4 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |
|   5 |     PX BLOCK ITERATOR |          | 20000 |     9M|   131 |  Q1,00 | PCWC |            |
|   6 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL| T2       | 20000 |     9M|   131 |  Q1,00 | PCWP |            |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Notice, in particular, that we only have one virtual table (or table queue :TQ10000) rather than two, which is between a parallel query slave set and the query co-ordinator, running parallel to serial: the query only uses one set of parallel query slaves.

Until you run the query with rowsource execution statistics enabled and look at the output from v$pq_tqstat it’s not going to be immediately obvious what has happened, but we should see that somehow Oracle is no longer broadcasting the first table even though it’s still doing something in parallel with both tables.

The run-time statistics confirm that we’ve only used one set of slaves, and tell us that each slave in the slave set has scanned the whole of table t1. This means each slave can build the full hash table and then go on to read rowid ranges from table t2. We’ve managed to get the benefit of broadcasting t1 (every slave has the whole of t1 so we don’t have to scan and distribute the big table t2 through the PX message pool) but we haven’t had to clone it multiple times through the PX message pool.

Clearly there’s a trade-off here that Oracle Corp. has decided is worth considering. I’m guessing it’s biased towards Exadata where you might run queries with a very high degree of parallelism. In that case the overhead of task switching as large numbers of messages are passed around may (and this is pure supposition) be greater than the added cost of loading the table into the buffer cache (of each instance) and having each slave scan it from there. (Reminder – 11g introduced two “opposite” changes to tablescans: “serial direct reads” and “parallel in-memory scans”.)

This is a cost-based decision, though. Given a “large enough” build table the optimizer will switch back to the plan that I reported for 11.2.0.4 with two slave sets and the scan of the build table being shared across the first set with the extracted rows being broadcast to the second set.

There’s one little oddity [Update: not so odd, as explained by Franck Pachot in comment #2] in this replication – there’s a pair of hints: pq_replicate and no_pq_replicate that you can use to control the effect if you think the optimizer is making the wrong choice. I would have guessed that in my example the hint would read: /*+ pq_replicate(t1) */ as it’s table t1 that is read by every single slave. Strangely, though, this is what the outline section of the execution plan showed:

  /*+
      BEGIN_OUTLINE_DATA
      PQ_REPLICATE(@"SEL$1" "T2"@"SEL$1")
      PQ_DISTRIBUTE(@"SEL$1" "T2"@"SEL$1" BROADCAST NONE)
      USE_HASH(@"SEL$1" "T2"@"SEL$1")
      LEADING(@"SEL$1" "T1"@"SEL$1" "T2"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$1" "T2"@"SEL$1")
      FULL(@"SEL$1" "T1"@"SEL$1")
      OUTLINE_LEAF(@"SEL$1")
      ALL_ROWS
      OPT_PARAM('_optimizer_cost_model' 'io')
      DB_VERSION('12.1.0.1')
      OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE('12.1.0.1')
      IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS
      END_OUTLINE_DATA
  */

Notice how the hint specifies table t2, not table t1 !

Footnote

Here’s a little anomaly,  and a generic warning about “optimizer_features_enable”: I found that if I used the hint /*+ optimizer_features_enable(‘11.2.0.4’) */ in 12c I could still get the pq_replicate() hint to work. Unfortunately there are a few places where the hint (or parameter) isn’t guaranteed to take the optimizer code backwards the full 100%.