Temporary Table Support for Teradata

Overview

SAS/ACCESS Interface to Teradata supports temporary tables. For more information, see Temporary Table Support for SAS/ACCESS.

About Volatile Temporary Tables in Teradata

Since volatile temporary tables are scoped to a user's session, the best practice is to name volatile temp tables with a unique name to avoid any name collision with permanent tables in the current default database. A volatile temp table name that is concatenated with a sequence number or a timestamp would avoid any collision. For example, suppose you have a user JOE who has a default database of DB1. JOE creates a permanent table FOO1 in database DB1, and then JOE creates a volatile temporary table named FOO1, which is scoped to his user session. This is valid, because although the table name is the same, the tables reside in different storage areas—DB1 and session JOE. However, if JOE references FOO1, such as a SELECT * FROM FOO1 statement, then there is an error from the Teradata server that says that the reference is ambiguous. If the temporary table name were named FOO_TMP1, then the collision error would not have happened.

Last updated: February 3, 2026