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  2. Metaplanning

Metaplanning is a feature that automates shard assignments for select offline queries.

This feature is automatically enabled by default for scheduled queries that have num_shards set. Contact our support team to enable metaplanning for all scheduled queries in your environments, including ones without an explicit num_shards set.

Any async offline query can be metaplanned by setting use_metaplaner=True in the API invocation.

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How It Works

Offline queries selected for metaplanning go through a metaplanning workflow:

Offline Query Submitted
↓
Step 1: Metaplan
Shard on:
Has inputs?
↓
Inputs
OR
Has input SQL?
↓
Results of input SQL
OR
No inputs?
↓
Primary keys
↓
Step 2: Autoshard
Input Data
100,000 rows
Count & Divide
→
by 10,000
Job 1
Job 2
...
Job 10
↓
Step 3: Sharded Query
Shard 1
10k rows
Shard 2
10k rows
...
Shard N
10k rows
All shards run simultaneously

Example: A query with 100,000 rows and the default target of 10,000 rows per shard creates 10 parallel shard jobs.

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Configuration

The shard size can be controlled via the CHALK_AUTOSHARDER_TARGET_ROWS_PER_SHARD environment variable (default: 10,000 rows per shard).

For scheduled queries:

  • If num_shards is set, metaplanning is automatically engaged.
  • If num_shards is not set, metaplanning can still be engaged as an environment setting.

For async offline queries:

  • If use_metaplanner=True, the query will be metaplanned.

​
Scheduled query example

ScheduledQuery(
    name="daily_user_scores",
    outputs=[User.id, User.score],
    schedule="0 0 * * *",
)

With metaplanning enabled, this query will:

  1. Compute shard keys to find all User IDs (since no input is specified)
  2. Autoshard the IDs based on the configured target
  3. Execute all shards in parallel

​
Async offline query examples

client.offline_query(
    input_sql='SELECT "user.id" FROM "chalk.resolvers.list_users"',
    outputs=[User.id, User.score],
    recompute_features=True,
    run_asynchronously=True,
    use_metaplanner=True,
)

This query will:

  1. Compute shard keys to find all User IDs by executing the input_sql.
  2. Autoshard the IDs based on the configured target
  3. Execute all shards in parallel
client.offline_query(
    max_samples=1000,
    outputs=[User.id, User.score],
    recompute_features=True,
    run_asynchronously=True,
    use_metaplanner=True,
)

This query will:

  1. Compute shard keys to find 1000 User IDs.
  2. Autoshard the IDs based on the configured target
  3. Execute all shards in parallel

​
See Also