I'm adding files on Amazon S3 from time to time, and I'm using Amazon Athena to perform a query on these data and save it in another S3 bucket as CSV format (aggregated data), I'm trying to find way for Athena to select only new data (which not queried before by Athena), in order to optimize the cost and avoid data duplication.
I have tried to update the records after been selected by Athena, but update query not supported in Athena.
Is any idea to solve this ?
Athena does not keep track of files on S3, it only figures out what files to read when you run a query.
When planning a query Athena will look at the table metadata for the table location, list that location, and finally read all files that it finds during query execution. If the table is partitioned it will list the locations of all partitions that matches the query.
The only way to control which files Athena will read during query execution is to partition a table and ensure that queries match the partitions you want it to read.
One common way of reading only new data is to put data into prefixes on S3 that include the date, and create tables partitioned by date. At query time you can then filter on the last week, month, or other time period to limit the amount of data read.
You can find more information about partitioning in the Athena documentation.
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I am uploading CSV files in the s3 bucket and creating tables through glue crawler and seeing the tables in Athena, making connection between Athena and Quicksight, and showing the result graphically there in quicksight.
But what I need to do now is keep the history of the files uploaded, instead of a new CSV file being uploaded and crawler updating the table, can I have crawler save each record separately? or is it even a reasonable thing to do? since I wonder it would then create so many tables and it'll be a mess?
I'm just trying to figure out a way to keep a history of previous records. how can i achieve this?
When you run an Amazon Athena query, Athena will look at the location parameter defined in the table's DDL. This specifies where the data is stored in an Amazon S3 bucket.
Athena will include all files in that location when it runs the query on that table. Thus, if you wish to add more data to the table, simply add another file in that S3 location. To replace data in that table, you can overwrite the file(s) in that location. To delete data, you can delete files from that location.
There is no need to run a crawler on a regular basis. The crawler can be used to create the table definition and it can be run again to update the table definition if anything has changed. But you typically only need to use the crawler once to create the table definition.
If you wish to preserve historical data in the table while adding more data to the table, simply upload the data to new files and keep the existing data files in place. That way, any queries will include both the historical data and the new data because Athena simply looks at all the files in that location.
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 want a table to store the history of a object for a week and then replace the same with history of next week. What would be the best way to achieve this in aws?
The data is stored in json format in s3 is a weekly dump. The pipeline runs the script weekly once and dumps data into s3 for analysis. For the next run of the script i do not need the previous week-1 data, so this needs to be replaced with new week-2 data. The schema of the table remains constant but the data keeps changing every week.
I would recommend to use data partitioning to solve your issue without deleting underlying S3 files from previous weeks (which is not possible via an Athena query).
Thus, the idea is to use a partition key based on the date, and then use this partition key in the WHERE clause of your Athena request, which will cause Athena to ignore previous files (which are not under the last partition).
For example, if you use the file dump date as partition key (let's say we chose to name it dump_key), your files will have to be stored in subfolders like
s3://your-bucket/subfolder/dump_key=2021-01-01-13-00/files.csv
s3://your-bucket/subfolder/dump_key=2021-01-07-13-00/files.csv
Then, during your data processing, you'll first need to create your table and specify a partition key with the PARTITIONED BY option.
Then, you'll have to make sure you added a new partition using the PARTITION ADD command every time it's necessary for your use case:
ALTER TABLE your_table ADD PARTITION (dump_key='2021-01-07-13-00') location 's3://your-bucket/subfolder/dump_key=2021-01-07-13-00/'
Then you'll be able to query your table by filtering previous data using the right WHERE clause:
SELECT * FROM my_table WHERE dump_key >= 2021-01-05-00-00
This will cause Athena to ignore files in previous partitions when querying your table.
Documentation here:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/partitions.html
I have a sample working where I put a file in S3.
What I'm confused about is what happens when I add new CSV files (with the same format) to that folder.
Are they instantly available in queries? Or do you have to run Glue or something to process them? So for example, what if set up a Lambda function to extract a new CSV every hour, or even every 5 minutes to that same S3 directory.
Does Athena actually load the data into some database somewhere in order to do fast performing queries?
If your table is not partitioned or you add a file to an existing partition the data will be available right away.
However, if you constantly add files you may want to consider partition your table to optimize query performance, see:
Table Location in Amazon S3
Partitioning Data
Athena itself doesn't have any caching, any query will hit the S3 location of the table.
My goal is to take daily snapshots of an RDS table and put it in a DynamoDB table. The table should only contain data from a single day.
For this have a Data Pipeline set up to query a RDS table and publish the results into S3 in CSV format.
Then a HiveActivity imports this CSV into a DynamoDB table by creating external tables for the file and an existing DynamoDB table.
This works great, but older entries from the previous day still exist in the DynamoDB table. I want to do this within Data Pipeline if at all possible. I need to:
1) Find a way to clear the DynamoDB table, or at least drop/recreate it, or
2) Include an extra column of the snapshot date and find a way to clear out all older entries.
Any ideas on how I can do this?
You can use DynamoDb Time to Live(TTL) which allows you to set an expiration time after which items are auto deleted from the DynamoDb table. TTL is very useful for cases where data loses it's relevance after a specific time period and in your case it can be start time of next day.