Query Processing and the Query Coordinator

The query coordinator is part of the shard catalog. The query coordinator provides query processing support for the sharded database. With its access to the sharded database topology metadata in the shard catalog, there are three general cases in which the query coordinator plays an important part.

1. Single Shard Queries with No Sharding Key

   If a sharding key is not passed from the application, the query coordinator figures out which shard contains the data required by the query and sends the query there for execution.

2. Multi-Shard Queries

   The query coordinator can also assist with queries that need data from more than one shard, called multi-shard queries, for example SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Customer.

3. Aggregate Queries

   The query coordinator handles aggregate queries typically used in reporting, such as aggregates on sales data.

In every case, the query coordinator’s SQL compiler identifies the relevant shards automatically and coordinates the query execution across all of the participating shards.

In a single-shard query scenario, the entire query is executed on the single participating shard, and the query coordinator just passes processed rows back to the client.

For a multi-shard query the SQL compiler analyzes and rewrites the query into query fragments that are sent and executed by the participating shards. The queries are rewritten so that most of the query processing is done on the participating shards and then aggregated by the coordinator.

The query coordinator uses Oracle Database's parallel query engine to optimize and push multi-shard queries in parallel to the shards. Each shard executes the query on the subset of data that it has. Then the results are returned back to the query coordinator, which sends them back to the client.

In essence, the shards act as compute nodes for the queries executed by the query coordinator. Because the computation is pushed to the data, there is reduced movement of data between shards and the coordinator. This arrangement also enables the effective use of resources by offloading processing from the query coordinator on to the shards as much as possible.

Specifying Consistency Levels

You can specify different consistency levels for multi-shard queries. For example, you might want some queries to avoid the cost of SCN synchronization across shards, and these shards could be globally distributed. Another use case is when you use standbys for replication and slightly stale data is acceptable for multi-shard queries, as the results could be fetched from the primary and its standbys. A multi-shard query must maintain global read consistency (CR) by issuing the query at the highest common SCN across all the shards.

High Availability and Performance

It is highly recommended that the query coordinator be protected with Oracle Data Guard in Maximum Availability protection mode (zero data loss failover) with fast-start failover enabled. The query coordinator may optionally be Oracle RAC-enabled for additional availability and scalability. To improve the scalability and availability of multi-shard query workloads, Oracle Active Data Guard standby shard catalog databases in read-only mode can act as multi-shard query coordinators.

In aggregation use cases and SQL execution without a sharding key, you will experience a reduced level of performance compared with direct, key-based, routing.