Why are some of my AWS Glue tables missing in Athena?

Short description

Tables that are in AWS Glue can be missing in Athena for the following reasons:

• The AWS Glue table has a data source that isn't Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
• You create the table in a format that isn't supported by Athena.
• Resources from AWS Lake Formation aren't available to Athena.

Resolution

The AWS Glue table data source isn't Amazon S3

Without connectors, the Athena console only shows tables that point to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) paths as the data source. AWS Glue shows tables that point to many different data sources, such as Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) DB instances and Amazon DynamoDB tables. For more information on how to query data from different sources in Athena, see Connect to data sources and Using Amazon Athena Federated Query.

Unsupported table formats

Your tables don't appear in the Athena console when you create them in data formats that aren't supported by Athena, such as XML. However, these tables do appear in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. For a list of formats are supported by Athena, see Choose a SerDe for your data.

Unavailable resources from Lake Formation

Resources in Lake Formation aren't automatically shared with Athena or granted access permissions. To make sure that resources are accessible between these services, create policies that allow your resources permission to access Athena. To manage resource policies at scale within a single account, use tag-based access control or use named resources. For more information about both of these options, see Securely share your data across AWS accounts using AWS Lake Formation.

Related information

What is Amazon Athena?

Defining and managing classifiers