How to emulate temporary tables in Athena
Currently (I wrote this article in October 2020), Athena does not support temporary tables, but we can easily emulate them using the CREATE TABLE AS SELECT statements:
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CREATE TABLE some_temp_table
WITH (format = 'PARQUET')
AS SELECT column_A, column_B, column_C
FROM source_table;
Unfortunately, we have to remember about removing the table when we no longer need it.
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DROP TABLE some_temp_table
If we don’t specify the S3 location, Athena will use the default results bucket as the storage location. I think it is good enough in the case of a temporary table.
Note that I used Parquet as the storage file type. In general, you should pick a file format that is best for the operations you want to perform later. Parquet is a columnar storage file that stores metadata about the content to scan and find the relevant data quickly.
Because the table we create is just a regular table, we can also use partitioning:
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CREATE TABLE some_temp_table
WITH (
format = 'PARQUET',
partitioned_by = ARRAY['column_A'])
)
AS SELECT column_A, column_B, column_C
FROM source_table;
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