Derik Hammer has some notes on temporary tables in Amazon Redshift:
One difference between regular tables and temporary tables is how they are typically used. Temporary tables are session scoped which means that adding them into a process or report will probably cause them to be created multiple times. Temporary tables might be very similar to regular tables but most regular tables are not re-written into, every time they are queried.
The disk writes involved in populating the temporary table might be more expensive than the reads would be if you were to modify your query to include the logic into one, larger, query. The frequency of the report or process will be a factor into how much of a performance hit you get by using the temporary tables. If you are using temporary tables to make debugging a procedure easier or to enhance readability, make sure you understand the IO cost of performing writes and then reading that data back into a subsequent query.
Read on for more.