Your plan shows sort or hash spills to disk. What are the likely causes and remedies?

Problem Statement

Explanation

Spills occur when the working set for sort or hash exceeds available memory grant. Causes include under-estimated cardinality, too many wide columns, or very large result sets. They slow queries dramatically due to temp I O. Reduce width by selecting only needed columns, improve estimates via statistics, and add supporting indexes to avoid big sorts. Tuning memory grants or work_mem can help, but fixing row estimates is usually the durable solution.

Code Solution

SolutionRead Only

-- Postgres example
SET work_mem = '256MB'; -- as a tactical fix alongside logical rewrites

Practice Sets

This question appears in the following practice sets:

Query Plans & Performance Tuning

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Your plan shows sort or hash spills to disk. What are the likely causes and remedies?

Problem Statement

Explanation

Code Solution

Practice Sets

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Your plan shows sort or hash spills to disk. What are the likely causes and remedies?

Problem Statement

Explanation

Code Solution

Practice Sets

Related Questions

Which SQL statement retrieves all columns and rows from a table named employees?

Which clause filters rows before aggregation and affects which rows are grouped?

What is the default sort order when ORDER BY is used without ASC or DESC?

Which construct is commonly used to paginate results in SQL engines like Postgres and MySQL?

Which predicate correctly checks for missing values in standard SQL?

More from SQL & Databases

Master Interviews
Anywhere, Anytime