Operations include halting a runaway query in response to determining that a performance metric of the query exceeds a performance threshold. The runaway query halting system receives a query execution plan associated with a query and divides the received execution plan into one or more components. For each component, the system determines a predicted resource usage associated with executing the component. The system further determines a predicted resource usage associated with the query execution plan based on the predicted resource usage associated with each component. The system executes the query associated with the received query execution plan and compares the predicted resource usage associated with the query to a resource usage threshold. In response to determining that the predicted resource usage of the query execution plan exceeds the resource usage threshold, the system halts execution of the query associated with the query execution plan.