Considerations and limitations for Athena views - Amazon Athena
ConsiderationsLimitations
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Considerations and limitations for Athena views

Athena views have the following considerations and limitations.

Considerations

The following considerations apply to creating and using views in Athena:

  • In Athena, you can preview and work with views created in the Athena Console, in the Amazon Glue Data Catalog or with Presto running on the Amazon EMR cluster connected to the same catalog.

  • If you have created Athena views in the Data Catalog, then Data Catalog treats views as tables. You can use table level fine-grained access control in Data Catalog to restrict access to these views.

  • Athena prevents you from running recursive views and displays an error message in such cases. A recursive view is a view query that references itself.

  • Athena displays an error message when it detects stale views. A stale view is reported when one of the following occurs:

    • The view references tables or databases that do not exist.

    • A schema or metadata change is made in a referenced table.

    • A referenced table is dropped and recreated with a different schema or configuration.

  • You can create and run nested views as long as the query behind the nested view is valid and the tables and databases exist.

Limitations

  • Athena view names cannot contain special characters, other than underscore (_). For more information, see Name databases, tables, and columns.

  • Avoid using reserved keywords for naming views. If you use reserved keywords, use double quotes to enclose reserved keywords in your queries on views. See Escape reserved keywords in queries.

  • You cannot use views created in Athena with external Hive metastores or UDFs. For information about working with views created externally in Hive, see Work with Hive views.

  • You cannot use views with geospatial functions.

  • You cannot use views to manage access control on data in Amazon S3. To query a view, you need permissions to access the data stored in Amazon S3. For more information, see Control access to Amazon S3 from Athena.

  • While querying views across accounts is supported in both Athena engine version 2 and Athena engine version 3, you cannot create a view that includes a cross-account Amazon Glue Data Catalog. For information about cross-account data catalog access, see Configure cross-account access to Amazon Glue data catalogs.

  • The Hive or Iceberg hidden metadata columns $bucket, $file_modified_time, $file_size, and $partition are not supported for views in Athena. For information about using the $path metadata column in Athena, see Getting the file locations for source data in Amazon S3 .