Athena Partition Projection for Date column vs. String - amazon-web-services

I'm looking to use Athena Partition Projection to analyze log files from AWS application load balancers and firehose emitted logs. The data in S3 is prefixed with year/month/day and potentially hour as well. I've been able to accomplish using the Firehose Example; however this example uses a string formatted partition column.
I'm looking to see if it's possible to use a date formatted partition column instead (with partition project and the firehose emitted s3 prefix format), as our query writers are already used to most of our queries involving date columns and it avoids the need to string format for relative date queries. Is this possible or would the s3 prefixes need to be changed to accomplish?
Table Properties for String column: WORKS
PARTITIONED BY (
`logdate` string)
TBLPROPERTIES (
'projection.enabled'='true',
'projection.logdate.format'='yyyy/MM/dd',
'projection.logdate.interval'='1',
'projection.logdate.interval.unit'='DAYS',
'projection.logdate.range'='NOW-2YEARS,NOW',
'projection.logdate.type'='date',
'storage.location.template'='s3://bucket/prefix/${logdate}')
Table Properties for Date Partition column Does Not Work
PARTITIONED BY (
`logdate` date)
TBLPROPERTIES (
'projection.enabled'='true',
'projection.logdate.format'='yyyy/MM/dd',
'projection.logdate.interval'='1',
'projection.logdate.interval.unit'='DAYS',
'projection.logdate.range'='NOW-2YEARS,NOW',
'projection.logdate.type'='date',
'storage.location.template'='s3://bucket/prefix/${logdate}')
HIVE_INVALID_PARTITION_VALUE: Invalid partition value '2018/11/13' for DATE partition key: logdate=2018%2F11%2F13

I think the only thing you need to do is make sure the type of the logdate partition key to be string:
PARTITIONED BY (logdate string)
This is not the same as projection.logdate.type, which should continue to be date.
Partition keys with type date are just dates within the calculations partition projection performs. For all other purposes they are strings. PP will parse values using the date format you specify, do its calculations, then output strings using the same date format. This happens during query planning, before the Presto engine is involved.
Presto's schema-on-read approach means that you can say that a column has type date if its format matches the expected format of dates; yyyy-MM-dd in Java format. The format that you get from Firehose's S3 keys, yyyy/MM/dd, can't be cast to date automatically, it needs to be explicitly parsed:
parse_datetime(logdate, 'yyyy/MM/dd')
I think it would have been great if PP would have been aware of the types of partition keys so that you could have done what you have tried to do, but I assume that since PP happens during query planning and most likely not anywhere near where the types of things are known it's probably too difficult to achieve.

Related

AWS Athena query on parquet file - using columns in where clause

We are planning to use Athena as a backend service for our data(stored as parquet files in partitions) in S3.
Some of the things we are interested to find out is how does adding additional columns in where clause of the query affect the query run time.
For example, we have 10million records in one hive partition(partition based on column 'date')
And all queries below return same volume - 10million. would all these queries take same time or does it reduce query run when we add additional columns in where clause(as parquet is columnar fomar)?
I tried to test this but results were not consistent as there was some queuing time as well I guess
select * from table where date='20200712'
select * from table where date='20200712' and type='XXX'
select * from table where date='20200712' and type='XXX' and subtype='YYY'
Parquet file contains page "indexes" (min, max and bloom filters.) If you sorting the data by columns in question during insert for example like this:
insert overwrite table mytable partition (dt)
select col1, --some columns
type,
subtype,
dt
distribute by dt
sort by type, subtype
then these indexes may work efficiently because data withe the same type, subtype will be loaded into the same pages, data pages will be selected using indexes. See some benchmarks here: https://blog.cloudera.com/speeding-up-select-queries-with-parquet-page-indexes/
Switch-on predicate-push-down: https://docs.cloudera.com/documentation/enterprise/6/6.3/topics/cdh_ig_predicate_pushdown_parquet.html

Querying S3 using Athena

I have a setup with Kinesis Firehose ingesting data, AWS Lambda performing data transformation and dropping the incoming data into an S3 bucket. The S3 structure is organized by year/month/day/hour/messages.json, so all of the actual json files I am querying are at the 'hour' level with all year, month, day directories only containing sub directories.
My problem is I need to run a query to get all data for a given day. Is there an easy way to query at the 'day' directory level and return all files in its sub directories without having to run a query for 2020/06/15/00, 2020/06/15/01, 2020/06/15/02...2020/06/15/23?
I can successfully query the hour level directories since I can create a table and define the column name and type represented in my .json file, but I am not sure how to create a table in Athena (if possible) to represent a day directory with sub directories instead of actual files.
To query only the data for a day without making Athena read all the data for all days you need to create a partitioned table (look at the second example). Partitioned tables are like regular tables, but they contain additional metadata that describes where the data for a particular combination of the partition keys is located. When you run a query and specify criteria for the partition keys Athena can figure out which locations to read and which to skip.
How to configure the partition keys for a table depends on the way the data is partitioned. In your case the partitioning is by time, and the timestamp has hourly granularity. You can choose a number of different ways to encode this partitioning in a table, which one is the best depends on what kinds of queries you are going to run. You say you want to query by day, which makes sense, and will work great in this case.
There are two ways to set this up, the traditional, and the new way. The new way uses a feature that was released just a couple of days ago and if you try to find more examples of it you may not find many, so I'm going to show you the traditional too.
Using Partition Projection
Use the following SQL to create your table (you have to fill in the columns yourself, since you say you've successfully created a table already just use the columns from that table – also fix the S3 locations):
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE cszlos_firehose_data (
-- fill in your columns here
)
PARTITIONED BY (
`date` string
)
ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.apache.hive.hcatalog.data.JsonSerDe'
LOCATION 's3://cszlos-data/is/here/'
TBLPROPERTIES (
"projection.enabled" = "true",
"projection.date.type" = "date",
"projection.date.range" = "2020/06/01,NOW",
"projection.date.format" = "yyyy/MM/dd",
"projection.date.interval" = "1",
"projection.date.interval.unit" = "DAYS",
"storage.location.template" = "s3://cszlos-data/is/here/${date}"
)
This creates a table partitioned by date (please note that you need to quote this in queries, e.g. SELECT * FROM cszlos_firehose_data WHERE "date" = …, since it's a reserved word, if you want to avoid having to quote it use another name, dt seems popular, also note that it's escaped with backticks in DDL and with double quotes in DML statements). When you query this table and specify a criteria for date, e.g. … WHERE "date" = '2020/06/05', Athena will read only the data for the specified date.
The table uses Partition Projection, which is a new feature where you put properties in the TBLPROPERTIES section that tell Athena about your partition keys and how to find the data – here I'm telling Athena to assume that there exists data on S3 from 2020-06-01 up until the time the query runs (adjust the start date necessary), which means that if you specify a date before that time, or after "now" Athena will know that there is no such data and not even try to read anything for those days. The storage.location.template property tells Athena where to find the data for a specific date. If your query specifies a range of dates, e.g. … WHERE "date" > '2020/06/05' Athena will generate each date (controlled by the projection.date.interval property) and read data in s3://cszlos-data/is/here/2020-06-06, s3://cszlos-data/is/here/2020-06-07, etc.
You can find a full Kinesis Data Firehose example in the docs. It shows how to use the full hourly granularity of the partitioning, but you don't want that so stick to the example above.
The traditional way
The traditional way is similar to the above, but you have to add partitions manually for Athena to find them. Start by creating the table using the following SQL (again, add the columns from your previous experiments, and fix the S3 locations):
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE cszlos_firehose_data (
-- fill in your columns here
)
PARTITIONED BY (
`date` string
)
ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.apache.hive.hcatalog.data.JsonSerDe'
LOCATION 's3://cszlos-data/is/here/'
This is exactly the same SQL as above, but without the table properties. If you try to run a query against this table now you will not get any results. The reason is that you need to tell Athena about the partitions of a partitioned table before it knows where to look for data (partitioned tables must have a LOCATION, but it really doesn't mean the same thing as for regular tables).
You can add partitions in many different ways, but the most straight forward for interactive use is to use ALTER TABLE ADD PARTITION. You can add multiple partitions in one statement, like this:
ALTER TABLE cszlos_firehose_data ADD
PARTITION (`date` = '2020-06-06') LOCATION 's3://cszlos-data/is/here/2020/06/06'
PARTITION (`date` = '2020-06-07') LOCATION 's3://cszlos-data/is/here/2020/06/07'
PARTITION (`date` = '2020-06-08') LOCATION 's3://cszlos-data/is/here/2020/06/08'
PARTITION (`date` = '2020-06-09') LOCATION 's3://cszlos-data/is/here/2020/06/09'
If you start reading more about partitioned tables you will probably also run across the MSCK REPAIR TABLE statement as a way to load partitions. This command is unfortunately really slow, and it only works for Hive style partitioned data (e.g. …/year=2020/month=06/day=07/file.json) – so you can't use it.

Amazon Athena scans lots of data when query involves only partitions

I have a table on Athena partitioned by day (huge table, TB of data). There's no day column on the table, at least not explicitly. I would expect that a query like the following:
select max(day) from my_table
would scan virtually no data. However, Athena reports that several hundreds of GB are scanned. Any idea why?
===== EDIT 2021-01-14 ===
I've recently bumped on this issue again. It turns out that when the underlying data is parquet then operations on partitions don't consume data. For other data formats that I've tried (including ORC) there is an associated data cost. It doesn't make any sense to me.
I don't know the answer for a fact but I guesstimate:
Athena just does not have the optimization of looking at the partition names only, when only they are queried. This is clear from its behaviour. So it scans everything.
Parquet has min/max for every column whereas ORC does it only if an index is present, AFAIU. Thus for Parquet Athena's query optimizer directs it to look directly at these rollup values, i.e., no scan is performed. It's different for ORC.
I know is a little late to answer this question for you Nicolas but it is important to keep here also some possible solutions.
Unfortunately, this is the way Athena works, Athena will read all data as a tableScan just to list the partitions values.
A possible workaround that works perfectly here is using the metadata of the partition instead of the data information, for example:
Instead of using this syntax:
select max(day) from my_table
Try to use this syntax:
SELECT day FROM my_schema."my_table$partitions" ORDER BY day DESC LIMIT 1
This second statement will read just metadata information and returns the same data you need.
It does not depend on the format but on the compression algorithm used. Snappy for ORC mostly & GZIP for parquet. This is what makes the difference

Query Streaming Data Using --time_partitioning_field

I am currently exploring how to query only the streaming buffer data in tables at regular intervals for generating a performance report at near real-time and found the following StackOverflow link:
How to query for data in streaming buffer ONLY in BigQuery?
However, the current type of partition is implemented using --time_partitioning_field
Using the following query forces to query all data from the table:
SELECT * FROM `<project>.<data-set>.<time-partitioned-streaming-table>`
where <time-partitioning-field> is null
The query doesn't show any difference as ideally the peak streaming buffer is # ~60MB per hour
Is there a way to query only the streaming data with this type of partition?
I believe this should work (but it is legacy SQL)
#standardSQL
CREATE TABLE test.newtable (transaction_id INT64, transaction_date DATE)
PARTITION BY transaction_date
OPTIONS(
partition_expiration_days=3,
description="a table partitioned by transaction_date"
)
#legacySQL
select * from [test.newtable$__UNPARTITIONED__]
It is not possible to query streaming buffer data for partioned tables because once a specific TIMESTAMP or DATE has been defined, data is "streamed directly to the partition".
Checking the official documentation you can also find the solution for ingestion-time partitioned tables mentioned in the link you posted.

Athena: Minimize data scanned by query including JOIN operation

Let there be an external table in Athena which points to a large amount of data stored in parquet format on s3. It contains a lot of columns and is partitioned on a field called 'timeid'. Now, there's another external table (small one) which maps timeid to date.
When the smaller table is also partitioned on timeid and we join them on their partition id (timeid) and put date into where clause, only those specific records are scanned from large table which contain timeids corresponding to that date. The entire data is not scanned here.
However, if the smaller table is not partitioned on timeid, full data scan takes place even in the presence of condition on date column.
Is there a way to avoid full data scan even when the large partitioned table is joined with an unpartitioned small table? This is required because the small table contains only one record per timeid and it might not be expected to create a separate file for each.
That's an interesting discovery!
You might be able to avoid the large scan by using a sub-query instead of a join.
Instead of:
SELECT ...
FROM large-table
JOIN small-table
WHERE small-table.date > '2017-08-03'
you might be able to use:
SELECT ...
FROM large-table
WHERE large-table.date IN
(SELECT date from small-table
WHERE date > '2017-08-03')
I haven't tested it, but that would avoid the JOIN you mention.