AWS Glue: Add An Attribute to CSV Distinguish Between Data Sets - amazon-web-services

I need to pull two companies' data from their respective AWS S3 buckets, map their columns in Glue, and export them to a specific schema in a Microsoft SQL database. The schema is to have one table, with the companies' data being distinguished with attributes for each of their sites (each company has multiple sites).
I am completely new to AWS and SQL, would someone mind explaining to me how to add an attribute to the data, or point me to some good literature on this? I feel like manipulating the .csv in the Python script I'm already running to automatically download the data from another site then upload it to S3 could be an option (deleting NaN columns and adding a column for site name), but I'm not entirely sure.
I apologize if this has already been answered elsewhere. Thanks!

I find this website to generally be pretty helpful with figuring out SQL stuff. I've linked to the ALTER TABLE commands that would allow you to do this through SQL.
If you are running a python script to edit the .csv to start, then I would edit the data there, personally. Depending on the size of the data sets, you can run your script as a Lambda or Batch job to grab, edit, and then upload to s3. Then you can run your Glue crawler or whatever process you're using to map the columns.

Related

Row level changes captured via AWS DMS

I am trying to migrate the database using AWS DMS. Source is Azure SQL server and destination is Redshift. Is there any way to know the rows updated or inserted? We dont have any audit columns in source database.
Redshift doesn’t track changes and you would need to have audit columns to do this at the user level. You may be able to deduce this from Redshift query history and save data input files but this will be solution dependent. Query history can be achieved in a couple of ways but both require some action. The first is to review the query logs but these are only saved for a few days. If you need to look back further than this you need a process to save these tables so the information isn’t lost. The other is to turn on Redshift logging to S3 but this would need to be turned on before you run queries on Redshift. There may be some logging from DMS that could be helpful but I think the bottom line answer is that row level change tracking is not something that is on in Redshift by default.

How does Amazon Athena manage rename of columns?

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.

Append CSV Data to Apache Superset Dataset

Using CSV upload in Apache Superset works as expected. I can use it to add data from CSV to a databse, e.g. Postgres. Now I want to apped data from a different CSV to this table/dataset. But how?
The CSVs all have the same format. But there is a new one for every day. In the end I want to have a dashboard which updates every day, taking the new data into account.
Generally, I agree with Ana that if you want to repeatedly upload new CSV data then you're better off operationalizing this into some type of process, pipeline, etc that runs on a schedule.
But if you need to stick with the uploading CSV route through the Superset UI, then you can set the Table Exists field to Append instead of Replace.
You can find a helpful GIF in the Preset docs: https://docs.preset.io/docs/tips-tricks#append-csv-to-a-database
Probably you'll be better served by creating a simple process to load the CSV to a table in the database and then querying that table in Superset.
Superset is a tool to visualize data, it allows uploading CSV for quick and dirty "only once" kind of charts, but if this is going to be a recurrent and structured periodical load of data, it's better to use whatever integrating tool you want to load the data, there are zillions of ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) tools out there (or scripting programs to do it), ask if your company is already using one, or choose the one that is simpler for you.

Strategy for Updating Schema/Data of Data Stored in AWS S3

At my organization, we are using a stack of AWS S3, AWS Glue, and Athena to drive some reporting of internal metrics. In general, this stack is great for quick set up for reporting off of raw data (stored in S3). The problem we've come against is what to do if we notice we need to somehow update the data that's already stored in S3. For example, we want to update values in a column that have a certain string to update that value.
Unlike a database, we can't just run a query to update all the existing data. I've tried to see if we can utilize Glue Jobs to accomplish this, but from my limited understanding, it doesn't seem like it's meant to do ETL from a bucket back to the same bucket.
The only thing I can think is to write a custom tool that iterates through an S3 bucket, loads a file, provides the transformation, and puts it back, overwriting the original. It seems there has to be a better way though.
Updates are not handled in a native way in a traditional hive-like warehousing solution, which I deem Athena to be. A common solution is a kind of engineering workaround where you do "insert overwrite" a partition (borrowing Hive syntax, possible in Presto and hopefully also possible in Athena, which is based on Presto).
Other solutions include creating new tables and atomically replacing a view, which users are supposed to query, instead of querying the underlying table(s) directly.
As this is a common problem, there are also some ready to use solutions to it, but I do not know whether which/whether they are possible with Athena. They are certainly possible with Presto (Presto SQL):
Hive ACID transactional tables (updates currently required Hive runtime)
Data Lake (open sourced by Databricks; updates currently require Spark runtime)
Hudi (I know little about this one)

How to split data when archiving from AWS database to S3

For a project we've inherited we have a large-ish set of legacy data, 600GB, that we would like to archive, but still have available if need be.
We're looking at using the AWS data pipeline to move the data from the database to be in S3, according to this tutorial.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/datapipeline/latest/DeveloperGuide/dp-object-copyactivity.html
However, we would also like to be able to retrieve a 'row' of that data if we find the application is actually using a particular row.
Apparently that tutorial puts all of the data from a table into a single massive CSV file.
Is it possible to split the data up into separate files, with 100 rows of data in each file, and giving each file a predictable file name, such as:
foo_data_10200_to_10299.csv
So that if we realise we need to retrieve row 10239, we can know which file to retrieve, and download just that, rather than all 600GB of the data.
If your data is stored in CSV format in Amazon S3, there are a couple of ways to easily retrieve selected data:
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL.
S3 Select (currently in preview) enables applications to retrieve only a subset of data from an object by using simple SQL expressions.
These work on compressed (gzip) files too, to save storage space.
See:
Welcome - Amazon Athena
S3 Select and Glacier Select – Retrieving Subsets of Objects