Query Planners

The query planner is the module that is responsible for taking a query sent to VTGate, split it across shards and combine the results to make it look like a single database. Since this is a critical piece of the system, we have made it easy to change which planner is used.

The following planners are available:

  • v3

    • This is the default planner. It is not being worked on anymore - new features are added to gen4.

  • gen4

    • The new planner added to vitess. It supports more queries, and is able to find plans that are more optimal than the old planner could. Read more about it here

  • left2right

    • This planner works similar to the straight_join directive in MySQL - the joins are going to be performed in the order specified by the query.

  • gen4fallback

    • This planner will first try the gen4 planner, and if it fails, it uses the v3 planner. This was useful during the development of gen4, but probably not very useful in production.

  • gen4comparev3

    • Finally, specifying the planner to gen4comparev3 will run the query using both planners, and compares the output, failing the query if the results do not agree.

Specifying the planner to use #

You can change which planner is to be used in two ways - you can specify the -planner_version flag when starting VTGate, and then you can override this value using a query hint.

Example of using the planner_version flag:

vtgate -planner_version=gen4 # rest of config follows here

Example of using the query hint to specify planner:

select /*vt+ PLANNER=gen4 */ * from commerce;

Testing the new planner using gen4comparev3 #

The latest version of the Vitess query planner, Gen4, changes most of the planner's internals. To ensure Gen4 produces plans that, once executed, give us the same results as what V3 would, we have developed a small test tool that runs queries using both Gen4 and V3 planners and compares their results. If the results we got are different from the two planners, the query will fail and the difference will be printed in VTGate's logs as a warning.

This tool is enabled by the use of a new planner: Gen4CompareV3, to use it, we must start VTGate with the -planner_version flag set to Gen4CompareV3. Once set, new queries will be tested against both Gen4 and V3.

The comparer planner runs the same query twice, so it will consume a lot more resources and take longer to run. It is only meant to be used for testing before switching query planners.

Query Planners