Stored procedure limitations - Amazon Redshift
DifferencesConsiderations and limits

Stored procedure limitations

This topic describes limitations for Amazon Redshift stored procedures.

The following considerations apply when you use Amazon Redshift stored procedures.

Differences between Amazon Redshift and PostgreSQL for stored procedure support

The following are differences between stored procedure support in Amazon Redshift and PostgreSQL:

  • Amazon Redshift doesn't support subtransactions, and hence has limited support for exception handling blocks.

Considerations and limits

The following are considerations on stored procedures in Amazon Redshift:

  • The maximum number of stored procedures for a database is 10,000.

  • The maximum size of the source code for a procedure is 2 MB.

  • The maximum number of explicit and implicit cursors that you can open concurrently in a user session is one. FOR loops that iterate over the result set of a SQL statement open implicit cursors. Nested cursors aren't supported.

  • Explicit and implicit cursors have the same restrictions on the result set size as standard Amazon Redshift cursors. For more information, see Cursor constraints.

  • The maximum number of levels for nested calls is 16.

  • The maximum number of procedure parameters is 32 for input arguments and 32 for output arguments.

  • The maximum number of variables in a stored procedure is 1,024.

  • Any SQL command that requires its own transaction context isn't supported inside a stored procedure. Examples include:

    • PREPARE

    • CREATE/DROP DATABASE

    • CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE

    • VACUUM

    • SET LOCAL

    • ALTER TABLE APPEND

  • The registerOutParameter method call through the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) driver isn't supported for the refcursor data type. For an example of using the refcursor data type, see Returning a result set from a stored procedure.