Diagnose spool errors before increasing the allowance.
A free, eight-page guide for Teradata developers and DBAs. Work through account limits, skew, execution plans and shared-user demand, with practical SQL and a reproducible experiment.
8 pages · October 2026 · No email required
Adapted from Teradata Query Performance Tuning by Roland Wenzlofsky and Artemios Vogiatzis.
What you will be able to check
- Whether a request is processing too much data, concentrating work on a few AMPs, or sharing its spool allowance with other sessions.
- How to inspect a per-AMP snapshot without mistaking it for query peak usage.
- Which redistribution keys and execution-plan steps deserve investigation.
- How to validate a correction without changing the intended result.
A tested example with the allowance unchanged
In our controlled four-AMP lab, an insert into a volatile target indexed on a constant key failed with error 2646 in all three attempts. With the target indexed on a distributed ID, all three inserts completed with 10,000 rows. The spool allowance stayed at 16,000,000 bytes.
The primary-index change affected both distribution and the plan. This is evidence of failure versus completion in that setup, not a claimed speedup or a guarantee for another workload.
Read the experiment and download its SQL and results. The guide’s additional diagnostic query patterns were checked on Teradata 20.00.28.81.
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