What causes DBCC CHECKTABLE to return “session is in the kill state”?

Question

A scheduled job step ran DBCC CHECKTABLE on a table but returned the following error:

Cannot continue the execution because the session is in the kill state. [SQLSTATE HY000] (Error 596). The step failed.

What causes this error?

Answer 1

Many things cause a session to enter a kill state. If other user kills your session, or if running command throws an error which severity needs terminate the connection (check this for more info https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/errors-events/database-engine-error-severities?view=sql-server-ver15)

When CHECK* commands result in this, ins most cases is because it triggers some error with severity 19 or higher. Can be your table corrupted or just a space problem. You must investigate further to more details.

Answer 2

After poking around, discovered that the volume was very low on space so probably didn't meet the free space requirements for "dbcc checktable".