SerDe reference

Specify ROW FORMAT DELIMITED and then use DDL statements to specify field delimiters, as in the following example. When you specify ROW FORMAT DELIMITED, Athena uses the LazySimpleSerDe by default.

ROW FORMAT DELIMITED 
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
ESCAPED BY '\\'
COLLECTION ITEMS TERMINATED BY '|'
MAP KEYS TERMINATED BY ':'

For examples of ROW FORMAT DELIMITED, see the following topics:

LazySimpleSerDe for CSV, TSV, and custom-delimited files

Querying Amazon CloudFront logs

Querying Amazon EMR logs

Querying Amazon VPC flow logs

Using CTAS and INSERT INTO for ETL and data analysis

Use ROW FORMAT SERDE to explicitly specify the type of SerDe that Athena should use when it reads and writes data to the table. The following example specifies the LazySimpleSerDe. To specify the delimiters, use WITH SERDEPROPERTIES. The properties specified by WITH SERDEPROPERTIES correspond to the separate statements (like FIELDS TERMINATED BY) in the ROW FORMAT DELIMITED example.

ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.lazy.LazySimpleSerDe'
WITH SERDEPROPERTIES (
'serialization.format' = ',',
'field.delim' = ',',
'collection.delim' = '|',
'mapkey.delim' = ':',
'escape.delim' = '\\'
)

For examples of ROW FORMAT SERDE, see the following topics:

Avro SerDe

Grok SerDe

JSON SerDe libraries

OpenCSVSerDe for processing CSV

Regex SerDe