Use a crawler to add a table - Amazon Athena
Create an Amazon Glue crawler
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Use a crawler to add a table

Amazon Glue crawlers help discover the schema for datasets and register them as tables in the Amazon Glue Data Catalog. The crawlers go through your data and determine the schema. In addition, the crawler can detect and register partitions. For more information, see Defining crawlers in the Amazon Glue Developer Guide. Tables from data that were successfully crawled can be queried from Athena.

Note

Athena does not recognize exclude patterns that you specify for an Amazon Glue crawler. For example, if you have an Amazon S3 bucket that contains both .csv and .json files and you exclude the .json files from the crawler, Athena queries both groups of files. To avoid this, place the files that you want to exclude in a different location.

Create an Amazon Glue crawler

You can create a crawler by starting in the Athena console and then using the Amazon Glue console in an integrated way. When you create the crawler, you specify a data location in Amazon S3 to crawl.

To create a crawler in Amazon Glue starting from the Athena console

  1. Open the Athena console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/athena/.

  2. In the query editor, next to Tables and views, choose Create, and then choose Amazon Glue crawler.

  3. On the Amazon Glue console Add crawler page, follow the steps to create a crawler. For more information, see Using Amazon Glue Crawlers in this guide and Populating the Amazon Glue Data Catalog in the Amazon Glue Developer Guide.

Note

Athena does not recognize exclude patterns that you specify for an Amazon Glue crawler. For example, if you have an Amazon S3 bucket that contains both .csv and .json files and you exclude the .json files from the crawler, Athena queries both groups of files. To avoid this, place the files that you want to exclude in a different location.

After a crawl, the Amazon Glue crawler automatically assigns certain table metadata to help make it compatible with other external technologies like Apache Hive, Presto, and Spark. Occasionally, the crawler may incorrectly assign metadata properties. Manually correct the properties in Amazon Glue before querying the table using Athena. For more information, see Viewing and editing table details in the Amazon Glue Developer Guide.

Amazon Glue may mis-assign metadata when a CSV file has quotes around each data field, getting the serializationLib property wrong. For more information, see Handling CSV data enclosed in quotes.