AWS Athena insert into with named columns not working in pyspark

Question

I've created a little test table using pyspark

query="""
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE IF NOT EXISTS test1
(
c1 INT,
c2 INT,
c3 INT
)
ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.OpenCSVSerde'
LOCATION 's3://mybucket/myfolder/'
"""
spark.sql(query)

And this works fine, producing the following output

spark.sql("select * from test1").show()

+---+---+---+
| c1| c2| c3|
+---+---+---+
|  1|  2|  3|
|  4|  5|  6|
+---+---+---+

My problem is trying to do an insert now. According to my reading of the Athena documentation I should be able to do the following but I'm getting an error message

query="""
insert into test1(c1,c2,c3) select c1,c2,c3 from test1
"""
spark.sql(query)


"\nmismatched input 'c1' expecting {'(', 'SELECT', 'FROM', 'VALUES', 'TABLE', 'INSERT', 'MAP', 'REDUCE'}(line 2, pos 21)\n\n== SQL ==\n\ninsert into test1(c1,c2,c3) select c1,c2,c3 from test1\n---------------------^^^\n"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/spark/python/lib/pyspark.zip/pyspark/sql/session.py", line 767, in sql
    return DataFrame(self._jsparkSession.sql(sqlQuery), self._wrapped)
  File "/usr/lib/spark/python/lib/py4j-0.10.7-src.zip/py4j/java_gateway.py", line 1257, in __call__
    answer, self.gateway_client, self.target_id, self.name)
  File "/usr/lib/spark/python/lib/pyspark.zip/pyspark/sql/utils.py", line 73, in deco
    raise ParseException(s.split(': ', 1)[1], stackTrace)
pyspark.sql.utils.ParseException: "\nmismatched input 'c1' expecting {'(', 'SELECT', 'FROM', 'VALUES', 'TABLE', 'INSERT', 'MAP', 'REDUCE'}(line 2, pos 21)\n\n== SQL ==\n\ninsert into test1(c1,c2,c3) select c1,c2,c3 from test1\n---------------------^^^\n"

However the following INSERT works as expected

query="""
insert into test1 select c1,c2,c3 from test1
"""

spark.sql(query)

If anyone can see what I'm doing wrong it would be appreciated

Answer 1

As per AWS documentation, you don't need to pass the column names alongwith the destination table. The correct query would be:

insert into test1 select c1,c2,c3 from test1

Reference: Athena insert into documentation