Techniques for enabling fault tolerant distributed query processing are provided. In one embodiment, a first processing node in a plurality of processing nodes can execute an instance of a query operator, where the query operator is part of a query plan for a database query that is processed in a distributed manner by the plurality of processing nodes. The first processing node can further generate a snapshot of the instance of the query operator, where the snapshot includes state information usable for moving execution of the query operator from the first processing node to another processing node after a failure of the first processing node. The first processing node can then save the snapshot to a distributed data store.