Discrepancy between Redshift data api DescribeStatement status and console status

Viewed 225

I'm loading data into redshift which usually takes about an hour when successful but seems to timeout randomly sometimes. I continue to get a "STARTED" status from DescribeStatement calls for my query but when I look in the console it says the query was ABORTED and rolled back via "Undoing 1 transactions on table ..." statement. But I'm not finding any errors in STL_LOAD_ERRORS related to the query or anything useful in STL_UTILITYTEXT for that transaction; though STL_UNDONE view does show the rollback.

I would've expected DescribeStatement to update with "FAILED" or "ABORTED" status when this occurred but that doesn't seem to be the case. Any idea what is causing the load to fail without any errors? Is there a way to catch/handle this via redshift data api? I'm currently thinking of checking STL_UNDONE after a specified time but was hoping there's a better solution.

2 Answers

Statement timeout seems like a likely cause. What you are describing sounds like the connection closed out from under the executing statement. There are a number of places where this timeout can come from but a common one is in the cluster configuration and the WLM configuration.

Another possibility is a network timeout. Database connections stay open for the entirety of the session but when a statement is in flight there is no activity on the connection. Some network equipment see this an assume that something is wrong and close the connection which closes the session which aborts the transaction in flight.

If your issue is caused by the connection closing you may be able to line things up in stl_sessions. There is info in there about timeouts but also you can see if the time the session closes is right when the query commands abort.

Just one area that could be causing your issue but is more common than people think.

So after escalating to AWS support, it was confirmed there was a bug on their end. Related to data API autoscaling protocols that were sometimes scaling down without waiting for outstanding tasks to complete. There's a temporary fix in place to avoid this happening while they implement a long term solution. Should hopefully be rolled out end of this month, June 2022.

Related