Question

An analyst reports that a reporting query joining a 10-million-row ORDERS table with a 500-row REGIONS table is running far slower than expected and consuming excessive memory. In the Query Profile, you notice the Join node shows an output row count of roughly 5 billion rows, and a filter is applied only after the join. What is the MOST likely cause and correct remediation?

Accepted Answer

The join is missing an equality condition, producing a Cartesian product; add the proper join key so rows are matched instead of cross-joined.

Answer

The warehouse is undersized; scale up to a larger warehouse so the 5 billion rows fit in memory.

Answer

The REGIONS table lacks a clustering key; add a clustering key on REGIONS to reduce the output rows.

Answer

Result cache is disabled; enable result caching so the join output is reused on subsequent runs.