Try Connecting to All Shards in Cluster with skip_unavailable_shards Enabled

Why it matters

This feature improves the reliability and completeness of schema retrieval from remote tables in distributed clusters. Previously, if skip_unavailable_shards was set, some shards might have been skipped too early, potentially leading to incomplete or inconsistent table structure information being fetched. The enhancement ensures that ClickHouse tries to connect to all shards to get the most accurate table structure data while still respecting shard availability settings.

How to use it

To enable this behavior, set the cluster option skip_unavailable_shards to 1 (true). When querying remote tables or system table functions that retrieve table structure, ClickHouse will then try to connect to all shards and skip only those that are truly unavailable.