Project: CockroachDB (App Definition and Development / Database)
File: 20151014_online_schema_change.md

Feature Name: onlineschemachange Status: completed Start Date: 2015-10-14 RFC PR: Cockroach Issue: Implement online schema change: adding or removing an index or column to a table without blocking access to the table. The existing schema change operations such as adding or removing an index are performed as a single transaction. This approach was convenient for initial implementation but infeasible for a table with any significant amount of data. Additionally, the single transaction approach necessitates reading the table descriptor on every SQL operation which is a significant performance bottleneck. We will implement online schema change which breaks down a high-level schema change operation such as `CREATE INDEX` into a series of discrete steps in such a way that user transactions are never blocked from accessing the table and yet never leave table or index data in an invalid state. Online schema change will be built on top of [table descriptor leases](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/RFCS/20151009tabledescriptor_lease.md) which describes the mechanism for asynchronously distributing modifications to table descriptors. This RFC is concerned with the actual steps of performing a schema change. Table descriptors will be enhanced to contain information about an on-going schema change operation: ```proto message TableDescriptor { ... oneof mutation { optional IndexDescriptor add_index; optional IndexDescriptor drop_index; optional ColumnDescriptor add_column; optional ColumnDescriptor drop_column; } } ``` Additionally, index and column descriptors will be enhanced to contain a state: ```proto enum State { DELETE_ONLY; WRITE_ONLY; PUBLIC; } ``` The `DELETE_ONLY` state specifies that `UPDATE` and `DELETE` operations should only remove keys from the index or for the column. The `WRITE_ONLY` state specifies that `INSERT`, `UPDATE` and `DELETE` operations should maintain the data for the index or column: adding or deleting as necessary. For both states, the column or index is not used for read operations. Lastly, the `PUBLIC` state allows the index or column to be used normally. The state for an index or column moves from `DELETE_ONLY` to `WRITE_ONLY` to `PUBLIC` or in reverse. It is invalid to jump from the `DELETE_ONLY` to `PUBLIC` state or vice versa. By moving the state in these discrete steps it can be shown that that a cluster will not create invalid data when two consecutive versions of the descriptor are in use concurrently. The table lease mechanism will be used to ensure that there are only two active versions of a descriptor in use in a cluster and the scheme change implementation will ensure that these two versions follow the state transition invariant. The state transition diagram (Figure 3) in [Online, Asynchronous Schema Change in F1](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/41376.pdf) is a useful reference. When an index is added to a table a potentially time consuming backfill operation needs to be performed to create the index data. This operation is performed when the index is in the `WRITE_ONLY` state and completed before moving the index to the `PUBLIC` state. Backfilling creates index entries for every row in the table. As such, it is infeasible for this backfilling to be performed transactionally: the transaction would create an unreasonable number of write intents and user transactions could cause the transaction to

Instead, backfill will be performed as a series of small transactions that process a fraction of the table at a time: ```go startKey := MakeTableIndexKey(desc.ID, desc.Primary) endKey := startKey.PrefixEnd() for startKey != endKey { var lastKey roachpb.Key err := db.Txn(func(ctx context.Context, txn *Txn) error { txn.SetPriority(VeryLowPriority) scan, err := txn.Scan(startKey, endKey, 1000) if err != nil { return err } lastKey = getLastKeyOfFullRowInScan(scan) b := makeIndexKeysBatch(scan) return txn.CommitInBatch(ctx, b) }) if err != nil { // Abort! } startKey = lastKey.Next() } ``` The above pseudo-code is intended to give the gist of how backfilling will work. We'll iterate over the primary index transactionally retrieving keys and generating index entries. We perform the backfilling work transactionally in order to avoid anomalies involving deletions. Backfilling might duplicate work performed by concurrent insertions or updates, but the blind overwrites of identical data are safe. Dropping an index involves a single `DelRange` operation. Dropping a column is more involved and will be performed as a back-delete process, similar to the above backfill process, which loops over the primary index for the table and deletes the column keys. Since schema change operations are potentially long running they need to be restartable or abortable if the node performing them dies. We accomplish this by performing the schema change operation for a table on a well known node: the replica holding the range lease for the first range of the table (i.e. containing the key `/<tableID>`). When a node receives a schema change operation such as `CREATE INDEX` it will forward the operation to this "table lease holder". When the table lease holder restarts it will load the associated table descriptor and restart or abort the schema change operation. Note that aborting a schema change operation needs to maintain the invariant that the descriptor version only increase. For initial implementation simplicity, we will only allow a single schema change operation at a time per table. This restriction can be lifted in the future if we see a benefit in allowing concurrent schema changes on a table (e.g. concurrently adding multiple indexes). None. This is rock solid. No real good ones. We could try to come up with some sort of global table lock mechanism and then synchronously perform the backfill. This seems as difficult as the current proposal and much worse for the user experience. Is there a way to avoid performing the backfilling work transactionally? Is it worth optimizing? Delete, in particular, seems problematic. If we scan a portion of the primary index non-transactionally and then generate index keys, a concurrent delete can come in and delete one of the rows and not generate a delete of the index key unless we left a "tombstone" deletion for the index key. If the node performing the backfill gets restarted we should figure out a way to avoid restarting the backfill from scratch. One thought is that the backfill operation can periodically checkpoint the high water mark of its progress: either in the descriptor itself (taking care not to bump the version) or in a separate backfill checkpoint table. Figure out how to distribute the backfill work. Ideally we would have each range of the primary index generate and write the index keys. Given that this is not an urgent need, I feel this is best left to a separate RFC.