Full text query in Amazon Athena is timing-out when using `LIKE` - amazon-web-services

Question

Getting timeout error for a full text query in Athena like this...
SELECT count(textbody) FROM "email"."some_table" where textbody like '% some text to seach%'
Is there any way to optimize it?
Update:
The create table statement:
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE `email`.`email5_newsletters_04032019`(
`nesletterid` string,
`name` string,
`format` string,
`subject` string,
`textbody` string,
`htmlbody` string,
`createdate` string,
`active` string,
`archive` string,
`ownerid` string
)
ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.OpenCSVSerde'
WITH SERDEPROPERTIES (
'serialization.format' = ',',
'field.delim' = ',',
'ESCAPED BY' = '\\'
) LOCATION 's3://some_bucket/email_backup_updated/email5/'
TBLPROPERTIES ('has_encrypted_data'='false');
And S3 bucket contents:
# aws s3 ls s3://xxx/email_backup_updated/email5/ --human
2020-08-22 15:34:44 2.2 GiB email_newsletters_04032019_updated.csv.gz
There are 11 million records in this file. The file can be imported within 30 minutes in Redshift and everything works OK in redshift. I will prefer to use Athena!

Answer 1

CSV is not a format that integrates very well with the presto engine, as queries need to read the full row to reach a single column. A way to optimize usage of athena, which will also save you plenty of storage costs, is to switch to a columnar storage format, like parquet or orc, and you can actually do it with a query:
CREATE TABLE `email`.`email5_newsletters_04032019_orc`
WITH (
external_location = 's3://my_orc_table/',
format = 'ORC')
AS SELECT *
FROM `email`.`email5_newsletters_04032019`;
Then rerun your query above on the new table:
SELECT count(textbody) FROM "email"."email5_newsletters_04032019_orc" where textbody like '% some text to seach%'