A system and/or method for spill-to-disk in projection operations includes receiving a query including a projection, receiving a plurality of rows in response to the query processed by a processing thread of a plurality of processing threads, determining whether the query specifies an order for the plurality of rows, determining whether a disk buffer associated with the processing thread contains a stored row in response to the query specifying the order, storing the plurality of rows in the disk buffer in response to determining the disk buffer contains the stored row, storing the plurality of rows in a memory buffer associated with the processing thread in response to determining the disk buffer does not contain the stored row and the memory buffer contains at least a threshold amount of memory to store the plurality of rows, and providing the stored plurality of rows in response to the query.