Big files, real risks, and how not to overspend On Snowflake, COPY INTO scales with the number of files, not the total GB. A single big file equals one unit of work. To go fast and cheap, publish many medium parts (about 100–250 MB compressed), size the warehouse to the files in flight, and use …
Snowflake’s physical join execution is predominantly hash-based. In practice you’ll observe hash-join variants with two distributions: If you come from Teradata, the intent will feel familiar: both systems aim to co-locate equal keys before matching. This article explains Snowflake’s strategies, maps them to Teradata’s (including dynamic plan fragments), and shows how to recognize and mitigate …
I was recently approached to support a case of importing the results of a Teradata query into a third-party vendor database. On the export side, Teradata happily wrote close to 60 million rows into a single, wide CSV file. On the other side, the import process to the target database could not cope with the …
Introduction to the Teradata AMP Worker Task The Teradata AMP Worker Task or AWT is the heart of the AMP, responsible for executing tasks and ensuring the smooth functioning of the system. AWTs are threads that process incoming tasks in the AMP. Each AMP has a finite pool of AWTs, which is shared among all …
Introduction to Teradata Performance and NOT NULL Welcome to our latest Teradata performance blog post, a series designed to provide valuable insights into SQL queries. This article spotlights ‘NOT NULL’. To delve deeper into ‘NOT IN’, it is crucial to comprehend a frequently neglected SQL database design principle: properly defining columns that cannot hold NULL …
Learn how to optimize your Teradata SQL performance by leveraging secondary indexes! Avoid full table scans by bypassing the COALESCE function in the WHERE clause.
Learn how to overcome the hurdle of using Teradata Identity columns with Volatile Tables. Discover a workaround using the ‘CREATE TABLE AS’ statement.
Running out of free Cylinders in Teradata Encountering a situation where free cylinders are exhausted is a significant concern when managing a system, and no more Teradata Space is available. It’s an issue that can adversely impact the operations and efficiency of the database, leading to potential slowdowns or even complete halts in data processing …
Introduction In a row-oriented database engine like Teradata, data is organized and stored in units called data blocks. Each data block features a fixed header and accommodates multiple rows. Every row consists of a record header followed by its corresponding columns. When a database retrieves and stores a data block in the cache, it accesses …
The Teradata flavor of SQL is still, in principle, a declarative language. Hence, there can be multiple ways to describe an SQL query and achieve the same result. While the answer is the same, Teradata may use a completely different execution plan based on how the query is expressed. One approach is investing in heavy …
Expert network for enterprise data platforms. Senior consultants, project teams built for your challenge — across Teradata, Snowflake, Databricks, and more.
📍Vienna, Austria & Jacksonville, Florida
Join 4,000+ data professionals.
Weekly insights on Teradata, Snowflake & data architecture.