# Query the Amazon Glue Data Catalog
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Because Amazon Glue Data Catalog is used by many Amazon Web Services services as their central metadata repository, you might want to query Data Catalog metadata. To do so, you can use SQL queries in Athena. You can use Athena to query Amazon Glue catalog metadata like databases, tables, partitions, and columns.

To obtain Amazon Glue Catalog metadata, you query the `information_schema` database on the Athena backend. The example queries in this topic show how to use Athena to query Amazon Glue Catalog metadata for common use cases.

## Considerations and limitations
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+ Instead of querying the `information_schema` database, it is possible to use individual Apache Hive [DDL commands](ddl-reference.md) to extract metadata information for specific databases, tables, views, partitions, and columns from Athena. However, the output is in a non-tabular format.
+ Querying `information_schema` is most performant if you have a small to moderate amount of Amazon Glue metadata. If you have a large amount of metadata, errors can occur.
+ You cannot use `CREATE VIEW` to create a view on the `information_schema` database. 

**Topics**
+ [Considerations and limitations](#querying-glue-catalog-considerations-limitations)
+ [List databases and searching a specified database](querying-glue-catalog-querying-available-databases-including-rdbms.md)
+ [List tables in a specified database and searching for a table by name](querying-glue-catalog-listing-tables.md)
+ [List partitions for a specific table](querying-glue-catalog-listing-partitions.md)
+ [List or search columns for a specified table or view](querying-glue-catalog-listing-columns.md)
+ [List the columns that specific tables have in common](querying-glue-catalog-listing-columns-in-common.md)
+ [List all columns for all tables](querying-glue-catalog-listing-all-columns-for-all-tables.md)