在 AWS Athena 中创建外部表时出错

Question

I get the following error when trying to create an external table in AWS Athena:

line 1:8: no viable alternative at input 'create external' (service: amazonathena; status code: 400; error code: invalidrequestexception

The code I'm using to create the table is the following. It is based on an existing Athena table. I used SHOW CREATE to get the DDL code.

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE h_test(
  test string
)
ROW FORMAT DELIMITED 
  FIELDS TERMINATED BY '#' 
  MAP KEYS TERMINATED BY 'undefined' 
WITH SERDEPROPERTIES ( 
  'collection.delim'='undefined') 
STORED AS INPUTFORMAT 
  'org.apache.hadoop.mapred.TextInputFormat' 
OUTPUTFORMAT 
  'org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.io.HiveIgnoreKeyTextOutputFormat'
LOCATION
  's3://cleverea-staging/test/'
TBLPROPERTIES (
  'has_encrypted_data'='false')

Answer 1

I am not sure if it is a good idea to get the HiveQL DDL statement from one table in AWS Athena and reusing it to create another one. There are multiple parameters that are not needed or specifically applied to that table.

Most of the time the parameters OUTPUTFORMAT or TBLPROPERTIES is not needed. For instance, if your S3 bucket is encrypted by default mode or with KMS you don't need to mention it, AWS is smart enough to know how to decrypt the data if needed.

It is a good practice to wrap database, table, and column names using backtick (`).

Good example:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `mydb`.`mytable` (
    `test` STRING,
    `test2` STRING
)
ROW FORMAT SERDE 
     'org.openx.data.jsonserde.JsonSerDe'
LOCATION
     's3://awsexamplebucket1-logs/AWSLogs/'

There is also a great generator online where you can easily convert any JSON (even complex Nested ones), CSV, TSV, or Log sample file to an Apache HiveQL DDL create table statement.

Link: https://www.hivetablegenerator.com/

Official reference from AWS: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/create-table.html