Partition Mergeout

Vertica keeps data from different table partitions or partition groups separate on disk. The Tuple Mover adheres to this separation policy when it consolidates ROS containers. When a partition is first created, it typically has frequent data loads and requires regular activity from the Tuple Mover. As a partition ages, it commonly transitions to a mostly read-only workload and requires much less activity.

The Tuple Mover has two different policies for managing these different partition workloads:

• Active partition is the partition that was most recently created. The Tuple Mover uses a strata-based algorithm that seeks to minimize the number of times individual tuples undergo mergeout. A table's active partition count identifies how many partitions are active for that table.
• Inactive partitions are those that were not most recently created. The Tuple Mover consolidates ROS containers to a minimal set while avoiding merging containers whose size exceeds MaxMrgOutROSSizeMB.

For details on how the Tuple Mover identifies active partitions, see Active and Inactive Partitions.

Partition Mergeout Thread Allocation

The TM resource pool sets the number of threads that are available for mergeout with its MAXCONCURRENCY parameter. By default , this parameter is set to 7. Vertica allocates half the threads to active partitions, and the remaining half to active and inactive partitions. If MAXCONCURRENCY is set to an uneven integer, Vertica rounds up to favor active partitions.

For example, if MAXCONCURRENCY is set to 7, then Vertica allocates four threads exclusively to active partitions, and allocates the remaining three threads to active and inactive partitions as needed. If additional threads are required to avoid ROS pushback, increase MAXCONCURRENCY with ALTER RESOURCE POOL.