Considerations and limitations - Amazon Athena
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Considerations and limitations

When you use Athena to read Apache Hudi tables, consider the following points.

  • Read and write operations – Athena can read compacted Hudi datasets but not write Hudi data.

  • Hudi versions – Athena supports Hudi version 0.14.0 (default) and 0.15.0. Athena cannot guarantee read compatibility with tables that are created with later versions of Hudi. For more information about Hudi features and versioning, see the Hudi documentation on the Apache website. To use 0.15.0 of the Hudi connector, set the following table property:

    ALTER TABLE table_name SET TBLPROPERTIES ('athena_enable_native_hudi_connector_implementation' = 'true')

  • Cross account queries – Version 0.15.0 of the Hudi connector does not support cross account queries.

  • Query types – Currently, Athena supports snapshot queries and read optimized queries, but not incremental queries. On MoR tables, all data exposed to read optimized queries are compacted. This provides good performance but does not include the latest delta commits. Snapshot queries contain the freshest data but incur some computational overhead, which makes these queries less performant. For more information about the tradeoffs between table and query types, see Table & Query Types in the Apache Hudi documentation.

  • Incremental queries – Athena does not support incremental queries.

  • CTAS – Athena does not support CTAS or INSERT INTO on Hudi data. If you would like Athena support for writing Hudi datasets, send feedback to .

    For more information about writing Hudi data, see the following resources:

  • MSCK REPAIR TABLE – Using MSCK REPAIR TABLE on Hudi tables in Athena is not supported. If you need to load a Hudi table not created in Amazon Glue, use ALTER TABLE ADD PARTITION.

  • Skipping Amazon Glacier objects not supported – If objects in the Apache Hudi table are in an Amazon Glacier storage class, setting the read_restored_glacier_objects table property to false has no effect.

    For example, suppose you issue the following command:

    ALTER TABLE table_name SET TBLPROPERTIES ('read_restored_glacier_objects' = 'false')

    For Iceberg and Delta Lake tables, the command produces the error Unsupported table property key: read_restored_glacier_objects. For Hudi tables, the ALTER TABLE command does not produce an error, but Amazon Glacier objects are still not skipped. Running SELECT queries after the ALTER TABLE command continues to return all objects.

  • Timestamp queries – Currently, queries that attempt to read timestamp columns in Hudi real time tables either fail or produce empty results. This limitation applies only to queries that read a timestamp column. Queries that include only non-timestamp columns from the same table succeed.

    Failed queries return a message similar to the following:

    GENERIC_INTERNAL_ERROR: class org.apache.hadoop.io.ArrayWritable cannot be cast to class org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.io.TimestampWritableV2 (org.apache.hadoop.io.ArrayWritable and org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.io.TimestampWritableV2 are in unnamed module of loader io.trino.server.PluginClassLoader @75c67992)