Athena Write Performance to AWS S3 - amazon-web-services

I'm executing a query in AWS Athena and writing the results to s3. It seems like it's taking a long time (way too long in fact) for the file to be available when I execute the query from a lambda script.
I'm scanning 70MB of data, and the file returned is 12MB. I execute this from a lambda script like so:
athena_client = boto3.client('athena')
athena_client.start_query_execution(
QueryString=query_string,
ResultConfiguration={
'OutputLocation': 'location_on_s3',
'EncryptionConfiguration': 'SSE_S3',
}
)
If I run the query directly in Athena it takes 2.97 seconds to run. However it looks like the file is available after 2 minutes if I run this query from the lambda script.
Does anyone know the write performance of AWS Athena to AWS S3? I would like to know if this is normal. The docs don't state how quickly the write occurs.

Every query in Athena writes to S3.
If you check the History tab on the Athena page in the console you'll see a history of all queries you've run (not just through the console, but generally). Each of those has a link to a download path.
If you click the Settings button a dialog will open asking you to specify an output location. Check that location and you'll find all your query results there.
Why is this taking so much longer from your Lambda script? I'm guessing, but the only possible suggestion I have is that you're querying across regions - if your data is in your region and your result location is in another location you might experience slowness due to transfer cost. Even so, 12MB should be fast.

Related

Fastest way to get exact count of rows for a 100GB CSV file stored on S3

What is the fastest way of getting an exact count of rows for a 100GB CSV file stored on Amazon S3 without using Athena nor any Fargate or EC2 VM? I can't use Athena, because the CSV file isn't clean-enough for it. I can't use Fargates or EC2 VMs, because I need a purely serverless solution. I can't use third-party services like Snowflake (native AWS services only).
Also, 100GB is too large to fit within a Lambda Function's /tmp (limited to 10GB). I could try to run something like DuckDB (or any other streaming database engine) on a Lambda and scan the entire file with a SELECT COUNT(*) FROM "s3://myBucket/myFile.csv" query, but the Lambda is quite likely to timeout, because its read bandwidth from S3 is 100MB/s at best, and it cannot run for more than 15 minutes (900s).
I know the approximate size of the file.
Note: I have an inaccurate estimate of the number of rows provided by AWS Glue Data Catalog's crawler, with an error margin of -50%/+100%. This could be used for some kind of iterative or dichotomous process, but I could not figure any out. For example, I tried adding an OFFSET with a value lower than but close to the number of rows to the aforementioned query, but the Lambda running DuckDB timed out. That was disappointing and somewhat surprising, because a query like SELECT * FROM "s3://myBucket/myFile.csv" LIMIT 10 OFFSET 10000000 worked well.
The fastest solution is probably to use SelectObjectContent with ScanRange to parallelize the request on chunks of 50MB or so.
Have you tried "AWS S3 select":https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/s3-glacier-select-sql-reference-select.html. It lets you run queries on S3 files. I use the service to get basic insight into any file on S3(Provided it can be queried).

AWS Glue - table version increases on data load even with no schema changes

I have a lambda job which infrequently dumps a parquet file into an S3 bucket/Glue table using AWS Wrangler.
This Glue table appears to be increasing the table version number every time there is new data, even though the schema is unchanged.
I do not think the problem is with the lambda job/wrangler, since it deposits the parquet files as expected. I have also tested that code separately and it works as expected.
Something is going on with the Glue data catalogue table that makes it increase versions despite no changes to the schema.
I have checked for differences in the underlying parquet files to see if there are some schema, data type etc changes between updates, and there are none.
I have checked for differences between the Glue table versions via the console and AWS CLI (aws glue get-table-versions) and found no differences there either (only the UpdateTime and VersionId changes).
I have tried to recreate my setup with the same code and do not find this issue. I have tried to delete and recreate the Glue table in the same place, but the issue reoccurs.
Question: What could be causing my Glue table version numbers to increase when there are no schema changes?
Note:
The code in question looks like this. It's part of a bigger function (this is really just generating logs of what the main lambda function is doing). It works fine on its own and doesn't use variables etc from the rest of the code. I don't see how this could be the issue but including it here anyway.
#other functions do some things when triggered by a new file in another s3 bucket
#this function is just logging which files were processed. It's the Glue table from these log files which is having issues with the version number increasing every time a new log file is added.
import aws-wrangler as wr
def log(resource, filename):
log_df = build_log(resource, filename) # for building the log df, just columns of date, time, file used etc
wr.s3.to_parquet(
df=log_df,
path=log_path(), #s3 bucket where parquet logs are being put
dataset=True,
catalog_versioning=False,
database="MYDB",
partition_cols=['date'],
table='log',
mode='append'
)
This is, I think due to partitioning. You are partitioning based on date, so I guess for every day of time unit a new partition will be added. The new partitions are the reason why the table version is being incremented.

Daily AWS Lambda not creating Athena partition, however commands runs successfully

I have an Athena database set up pointing at an S3 bucket containing ALB logs, and it all works correctly. I partition the table by a column called datetime and the idea is that it has the format YYYY/MM/DD.
I can manually create partitions through the Athena console, using the following command:
ALTER TABLE alb_logs ADD IF NOT EXISTS PARTITION (datetime='2019-08-01') LOCATION 's3://mybucket/AWSLogs/myaccountid/elasticloadbalancing/eu-west-1/2019/08/01/'
I have created a lambda to run daily to create a new partition, however this doesn't seem to work. I use the boto3 python client and execute the following:
result = athena.start_query_execution(
QueryString = "ALTER TABLE alb_logs ADD IF NOT EXISTS PARTITION (datetime='2019-08-01') LOCATION 's3://mybucket/AWSLogs/myaccountid/elasticloadbalancing/eu-west-1/2019/08/01/'",
QueryExecutionContext = {
'Database': 'web'
},
ResultConfiguration = {
"OutputLocation" : "s3://aws-athena-query-results-093305704519-eu-west-1/Unsaved/"
}
)
This appears to run successfully without any errors and the query execution even returns a QueryExecutionId as it should. However if I run SHOW PARTITIONS web.alb_logs; via the Athena console it hasn't created the partition.
I have a feeling it could be down to permissions, however I have given the lambda execution role full permissions to all resources on S3 and full permissions to all resources on Athena and it still doesn't seem to work.
Since Athena query execution is asynchronous your Lambda function never sees the result of the query execution, it just gets the result of starting the query.
I would be very surprised if this wasn't a permissions issue, but because of the above the error will not appear in the Lambda logs. What you can do is to log the query execution ID and look it up with the GetQueryExecution API call to see that the query succeeded.
Even better would be to rewrite your code to use the Glue APIs directly to add the partitions. Adding a partition is a quick and synchronous operation in Glue, which means you can make the API call and get a status in the same Lambda execution. Have a look at the APIs for working with partitions: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/glue/latest/dg/aws-glue-api-catalog-partitions.html

How to suppress column headers in AWS Athena query result?

I'm running a SELECT Athena query on an S3 bucket manifest. I then want to use the results of that query, in .csv format, in an S3 Batch operation.
My query runs fine and I am able to access the .csv output via S3 Batch, but since the first row is actually column headers, S3 Batch to throws an unrecoverable error because it thinks that the manifest is now referring to multiple buckets.
How can I easily strip the column headers out of my results? I would prefer to just do it in SQL. The file size makes using standard unix tools prohibitive. I could use AWS Glue, but this seems like overkill for just suppressing headers in a SQL query.
Here's a hacky way to get around it
SELECT bucket as "my-bucket-name", key as "fakekey"
from your_athena_table
This will make your header look like the rest of the file which will not break the S3 Batch copy job. You will have just one failed record of fakekey

"Realtime" syncing of large numbers of log files to S3

I have a large number of logfiles from a service that I need to regularly run analysis on via EMR/Hive. There are thousands of new files per day, and they can technically come out of order relative to the file name (e.g. a batch of files comes a week after the date in the file name).
I did an initial load of the files via Snowball, then set up a script that syncs the entire directory tree once per day using the 'aws s3 sync' cli command. This is good enough for now, but I will need a more realtime solution in the near future. The issue with this approach is that it takes a very long time, on the order of 30 minutes per day. And using a ton of bandwidth all at once! I assume this is because it needs to scan the entire directory tree to determine what files are new, then sends them all at once.
A realtime solution would be beneficial in 2 ways. One, I can get the analysis I need without waiting up to a day. Two, the network use would be lower and more spread out, instead of spiking once a day.
It's clear that 'aws s3 sync' isn't the right tool here. Has anyone dealt with a similar situation?
One potential solution could be:
Set up a service on the log-file side that continuously syncs (or aws s3 cp) new files based on the modified date. But wouldn't that need to scan the whole directory tree on the log server as well?
For reference, the log-file directory structure is like:
/var/log/files/done/{year}/{month}/{day}/{source}-{hour}.txt
There is also a /var/log/files/processing/ directory for files being written to.
Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
You could have a Lambda function triggered automatically as a new object is saved on your S3 bucket. Check Using AWS Lambda with Amazon S3 for details. The event passed to the Lambda function will contain the file name, allowing you to target only the new files in the syncing process.
If you'd like wait until you have, say 1,000 files, in order to sync in batch, you could use AWS SQS and the following workflow (using 2 Lambda functions, 1 CloudWatch rule and 1 SQS queue):
S3 invokes Lambda whenever there's a new file to sync
Lambda stores the filename in SQS
CloudWatch triggers another Lambda function every X minutes/hours to check how many files are there in SQS for syncing. Once there's 1,000 or more, it retrieves those filenames and run the syncing process.
Keep in mind that Lambda has a hard timeout of 5 minutes. If you sync job takes too long, you'll need to break it in smaller chunks.
You could set the bucket up to log HTTP requests to a separate bucket, then parse the log to look for newly created files and their paths. One troublespot, as well as PUT requests, you have to look for the multipart upload ops which are a sequence of POSTs. Best to log for a few days to see what gets created before putting any effort in to this approach