当s3数据存储同时包含json和.gz压缩文件时，如何通过Glue搜寻器创建AWS Athena表？

Question

I have two problems in my intended solution:

1. My S3 store structure is as following:

mainfolder/date=2019-01-01/hour=14/abcd.json
mainfolder/date=2019-01-01/hour=13/abcd2.json.gz
...
mainfolder/date=2019-01-15/hour=13/abcd74.json.gz

All json files have the same schema and I want to make a crawler pointing to mainfolder/ which can then create a table in Athena for querying.

I have already tried with just one file format, eg if the files are just json or just gz then the crawler works perfectly but I am looking for a solution through which I can automate either type of file processing. I am open to write a custom script or any out of the box solution but need pointers where to start.

2. The second issue that my json data has a field(column) which the crawler interprets as struct data but I want to make that field type as string . Reason being that if the type remains struct the date/hour partitions get a mismatch error as obviously struct data has not the same internal schema across the files. I have tried to make a custom classifier but there are no options there to describe data types.

Answer 1

I would suggest skipping using a crawler altogether. In my experience Glue crawlers are not worth the problems they cause. It's easy to create tables with the Glue API, and so is adding partitions. The API is a bit verbose, especially adding partitions, but it's much less pain than trying to make a crawler do what you want it to do.

You can of course also create the table from Athena , that way you can be sure you get tables that work with Athena (otherwise there are some details you need to get right). Adding partitions is also less verbose using SQL through Athena, but slower.

Answer 2

Crawler will not take compressed and uncompressed data together , so it will not work out of box. It is better to write spark job in glue and use spark.read()