is there a way to limit the amount of memory used by a query so it does not hog the resources

You can use dedicated user define pool for this query , please note that the user define pool is one per user , so your query has to run from a specific user

Hello Jeffrey: The Admin guide has a section about managing workloads, and specifically describes the 'big' user query issue that Eli mentions. Here's the main section: https://my.vertica.com/docs/6.1.x/HTML/index.htm#14117.htm The Programmer's guide discusses optimizing query performance, which might also be relevant for queries generally: https://my.vertica.com/docs/6.1.x/HTML/index.htm#12525.htm Thanks for the question and hope this helps. Kanti