How can I resolve the Athena query error "Query exhausted resources at this scale factor"?

Resolution

This error might occur if the demands of the query exceed the resources available to the cluster that ran the query. For more information, see Resource limits.

To resolve this issue, follow these best practices to optimize your queries.

Reduce the amount of time to run the query from Athena

To reduce query time, follow these steps:

• Use partition projection to divide your table into parts and keep the related data together.
• Compress files, or split them if you can. For more information on supported compression formats, see Athena compression support.
• Optimize the size of your files.

Query performance tuning

To increase the performance of your queries, follow these steps:

• Reduce the number of requests, or distribute the requests over a specific time period.
• Use an ExponentialBackoff algorithm to implement longer wait times between query retries or when you simultaneously run multiple queries. For more information, see Retry behavior.
• Implement performance tuning tips to improve your query performance in Athena. For more information, see Performance tuning in Athena.
• To make sure that your queries run, use capacity reservations. For more information on capacity reservation pricing, see Amazon Athena pricing.
• Use capacity reservations to get dedicated process capacity for queries to manage your workloads. For more information, see Performance tuning in Athena.

Use EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN ANALYZE statements

Use EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN ANALYZE in Athena for complex queries. The EXPLAIN statement can optimize queries by refining SQL statements and by verifying partition pruning. Make sure that you review the considerations and limitations with the EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN ANALYZE statements.

For more information, see EXPLAIN examples.

Related information

Why do my Amazon Athena queries take a long time to run?

How can I resolve "Query Timeout" errors in Athena?

Amazon Athena announces one hour reservations for Provisioned Capacity