I have an existing Athena table (w/ hive-style partitions) that's using the Avro SerDe. When I first created the table, I declared the Athena schema as well as the Athena avro.schema.literal schema per AWS instructions. Everything has been working great.
I now wish to add new columns that will apply going forward but not be present on the old partitions. I tried a basic ADD COLUMNS command that claims to succeed but has no impact on SHOW CREATE TABLE. I then wondered if I needed to change the Avro schema declaration as well, which I attempted to do but discovered that ALTER TABLE SET SERDEPROPERTIES DDL is not supported in Athena.
AWS claims I should be able to add columns when using Avro, but at this point I'm unsure how to do it. Even if I'm willing to drop the table metadata and redeclare all of the partitions, I'm not sure how to do it right since the schema is different on the historical partitions.
Looking for high-level guidance on the steps to be taken. Documentation is scant and Athena seems to be lacking support for commands that are referenced in this same scenario in vanilla Hive world. Thanks for any insights.
Related
I am building an ETL pipeline using primarily state machines, Athena, S3, and the Glue catalog. In general things work in the following way:
A table, partitioned by "version", exists in the Glue Catalog. The table represents the output destination of some ETL process.
A step function (managed by some other process) executes "INSERT INTO" athena queries. The step function supplies a "version" that is used as part of the "INSERT INTO" query so that new data can be appended into the table defined in (1). The table contains all "versions" - it's a historical table that grows over time.
My question is: What is a good way of exposing a view/table that allows someone (or something) to query only the latest "version" partition for a given historically partitioned table?
I've looked into other table types AWS offers, including Governed tables and Iceberg tables. Each seems to have some incompatibility with our existing or planned future architecture:
Governed tables do not support writes via athena insert queries. Only Glue ETL/Spark seems to be supported at the moment.
Iceberg tables do not support Lake Formation data filters (which we'd like to use in the future to control data access)
Iceberg tables also seem to have poor performance. Anecdotally, it can take several seconds to insert a very small handful of rows to a given iceberg table. I'd worry about future performance when we want to insert a million rows.
everyone!
I'm working on a solution that intends to use Amazon Athena to run SQL queries from Parquet files on S3.
Those filed will be generated from a PostgreSQL database (RDS). I'll run a query and export data to S3 using Python's Pyarrow.
My question is: since Athena is schema-on-read, add or delete of columns on database will not be a problem...but what will happen when I get a column renamed on database?
Day 1: COLUMNS['col_a', 'col_b', 'col_c']
Day 2: COLUMNS['col_a', 'col_beta', 'col_c']
On Athena,
SELECT col_beta FROM table;
will return only data from Day 2, right?
Is there a way that Athena knows about these schema evolution or I would have to run a script to iterate through all my files on S3, rename columns and update table schema on Athena from 'col_a' to 'col_beta'?
Would AWS Glue Data Catalog help in any way to solve this?
I'll love to discuss more about this!
I recommend reading more about handling schema updates with Athena here. Generally Athena supports multiple ways of reading Parquet files (as well as other columnar data formats such as ORC). By default, using Parquet, columns will be read by name, but you can change that to reading by index as well. Each way has its own advantages / disadvantages dealing with schema changes. Based on your example, you might want to consider reading by index if you are sure new columns are only appended to the end.
A Glue crawler can help you to keep your schema updated (and versioned), but it doesn't necessarily help you to resolve schema changes (logically). And it comes at an additional cost, of course.
Another approach could be to use a schema that is a superset of all schemas over time (using columns by name) and define a view on top of it to resolve changes "manually".
You can set a granularity based on 'On Demand' or 'Time Based' for the AWS Glue crawler, so every time your data on the S3 updates a new schema will be generated (you can edit the schema on the data types for the attributes). This way your columns will stay updated and you can query on the new field.
Since AWS Athena reads data in CSV and TSV in the "order of the columns" in the schema and returns them in the same order. It does not use column names for mapping data to a column, which is why you can rename columns in CSV or TSV without breaking Athena queries.
I am trying to automatically generate a data documentation in the Redshift cluster for all the maintained data products, but I am having trouble to do so.
Is there a way to fetch/store metadata about tables/columns in redshift directly?
Is there also some automatic way to determine what are the unique keys in a Redshift table?
For example an ideal solution would be to have:
Table location (cluster, schema, etc.)
Table description (what is the table for)
Each column's description (what is each column for, data type, is it a key column, if so what type, etc.)
Column's distribution (min, max, median, mode, etc.)
Columns which together form a unique entry in the table
I fully understand that getting the descriptions automatically is pretty much impossible, but I couldn't find a way to store the descriptions in redshift directly, instead I'd have to use 3rd party solutions or generally a documentation outside of the SQL scripts, which I'm not a big fan of, due to the way the data products are built right now. Thus having a way to store each table's/column's description in redshift would be greatly appreciated.
Amazon Redshift has the ability to store a COMMENT on:
TABLE
COLUMN
CONSTRAINT
DATABASE
VIEW
You can use these comments to store descriptions. It might need a bit of table joining to access.
See: COMMENT - Amazon Redshift
We have a very large number of folders and files in S3, all under one particular folder, and we want to crawl for all the CSV files, and then query them from one table in Athena. The CSV files all have the same schema. The problem is that the crawler is generating a table for every file, instead of one table. Crawler configurations have a checkbox option to "Create a single schema for each S3 path" but this doesn't seem to do anything.
Is what I need possible? Thanks.
Glue crawlers claims to solve many problems, but in fact solves few. If you're slightly outside the scope of what they designed for you're out of luck. There might be a way to configure it to do what you want, but in my experience trying to make Glue crawlers do things that aren't perfectly aligned with it is not worth the effort.
It sounds like you have a good idea of what the schema of your data is. When that is the case Glue crawlers also provide very little value. You probably have a better idea of what the schema should look than Glue will ever be able to figure out.
I suggest that you manually create the table, and write a one off script that lists all the partition locations on S3 that you want to include in the table and generate ALTER TABLE ADD PARTITION … SQL, or Glue API calls to add those partitions to the table.
To keep the table up to date when new partition locations are added, have a look at this answer for guidance: https://stackoverflow.com/a/56439429/1109
One way to do what you want is to use just one of the tables created by the crawler as an example, and create a similar table manually (in AWS Glue->Tables->Add tables, or in Athena itself, with
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE `tablename`(
`column1` string,
`column2` string, ...
using existing table as an example, you can see the query used to create that table in Athena when you go to Database -> select your data base from Glue Data Catalog, then click on 3 dots in front of the one "automatically created by crawler table" that you choose as an example, and click on "Generate Create table DDL" option. It will generate a big query for you, modify it as necessary (I believe you need to look at LOCATION and TBLPROPERTIES parts, mostly).
When you run this modified query in Athena, a new table will appear in Glue data catalog. But it will not have any information about your s3 files and partitions, and crawler most likely will not update metastore info for you. So you can in Athena run "MSCK REPAIR TABLE tablename;" query (it's not very efficient, but works for me), and it will add missing file information, in the Result tab you will see something like (in case you use partitions on s3, of course):
Partitions not in metastore: tablename:dt=2020-02-03 tablename:dt=2020-02-04
Repair: Added partition to metastore tablename:dt=2020-02-03
Repair: Added partition to metastore tablename:dt=2020-02-04
After that you should be able to run your Athena queries.
I have read several other posts about this and in particular this question with an answer by greg about how to do it in Hive. I would like to know how to account for DynamoDB tables with variable amounts of columns though?
That is, the original DynamoDB table has rows that were added dynamically with different columns. I have tried to view the exportDynamoDBToS3 script that Amazon uses in their DataPipeLine service but it has code like the following which does not seem to map the columns:
-- Map DynamoDB Table
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE dynamodb_table (item map<string,string>)
STORED BY 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.dynamodb.DynamoDBStorageHandler'
TBLPROPERTIES ("dynamodb.table.name" = "MyTable");
(As an aside, I have also tried using the Datapipe system but found it rather frustrating as I could not figure out from the documentation how to perform simple tasks like run a shell script without everything failing.)
It turns out that the Hive script that I posted in the original question works just fine but only if you are using the correct version of Hive. It seems that even with the install-hive command set to install the latest version, the version used is actually dependent on the AMI Version.
After doing a fair bit of searching I managed to find the following in Amazon's docs (emphasis mine):
Create a Hive table that references data stored in Amazon DynamoDB. This is similar to
the preceding example, except that you are not specifying a column mapping. The table
must have exactly one column of type map. If you then create an EXTERNAL
table in Amazon S3 you can call the INSERT OVERWRITE command to write the data from
Amazon DynamoDB to Amazon S3. You can use this to create an archive of your Amazon
DynamoDB data in Amazon S3. Because there is no column mapping, you cannot query tables
that are exported this way. Exporting data without specifying a column mapping is
available in Hive 0.8.1.5 or later, which is supported on Amazon EMR AMI 2.2.3 and later.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/EMR_Hive_Commands.html