Post Syndicated from Pathik Shah original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/run-spark-sql-on-amazon-athena-spark/
At AWS re:Invent 2022, Amazon Athena launched support for Apache Spark. With this launch, Amazon Athena supports two open-source query engines: Apache Spark and Trino. Athena Spark allows you to build Apache Spark applications using a simplified notebook experience on the Athena console or through Athena APIs. Athena Spark notebooks support PySpark and notebook magics to allow you to work with Spark SQL. For interactive applications, Athena Spark allows you to spend less time waiting and be more productive, with application startup time in under a second. And because Athena is serverless and fully managed, you can run your workloads without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
Modern applications store massive amounts of data on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data lakes, providing cost-effective and highly durable storage, and allowing you to run analytics and machine learning (ML) from your data lake to generate insights on your data. Before you run these workloads, most customers run SQL queries to interactively extract, filter, join, and aggregate data into a shape that can be used for decision-making, model training, or inference. Running SQL on data lakes is fast, and Athena provides an optimized, Trino- and Presto-compatible API that includes a powerful optimizer. In addition, organizations across multiple industries such as financial services, healthcare, and retail are adopting Apache Spark, a popular open-source, distributed processing system that is optimized for fast analytics and advanced transformations against data of any size. With support in Athena for Apache Spark, you can use both Spark SQL and PySpark in a single notebook to generate application insights or build models. Start with Spark SQL to extract, filter, and project attributes that you want to work with. Then to perform more complex data analysis such as regression tests and time series forecasting, you can use Apache Spark with Python, which allows you to take advantage of a rich ecosystem of libraries, including data visualization in Matplot, Seaborn, and Plotly.
In this first post of a three-part series, we show you how to get started using Spark SQL in Athena notebooks. We demonstrate querying databases and tables in the Amazon S3 and the AWS Glue Data Catalog using Spark SQL in Athena. We cover some common and advanced SQL commands used in Spark SQL, and show you how to use Python to extend your functionality with user-defined functions (UDFs) as well as to visualize queried data. In the next post, we’ll show you how to use Athena Spark with open-source transactional table formats. In the third post, we’ll cover analyzing data sources other than Amazon S3 using Athena Spark.
Prerequisites
To get started, you will need the following:
- All the prerequisites mentioned in the post Explore your data lake using Amazon Athena for Apache Spark.
- A basic understanding of the AWS Glue Data Catalog, Athena, and Apache Spark.
- An Athena Spark workgroup configured for use. For setup instructions, refer to Getting started with Apache Spark on Amazon Athena.
- A notebook created in the workgroup with default session parameters. For instructions, refer to Creating your own notebook.
Provide Athena Spark access to your data through an IAM role
As you proceed through this walkthrough, we create new databases and tables. By default, Athena Spark doesn’t have permission to do this. To provide this access, you can add the following inline policy to the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role attached to the workgroup, providing the region and your account number. For more information, refer to the section To embed an inline policy for a user or role (console) in Adding IAM identity permissions (console).
Run SQL queries directly in notebook without using Python
When using Athena Spark notebooks, we can run SQL queries directly without having to use PySpark. We do this by using cell magics, which are special headers in a notebook that change the cells’ behavior. For SQL, we can add the %%sql magic, which will interpret the entire cell contents as a SQL statement to be run on Athena Spark.
Now that we have our workgroup and notebook created, let’s start exploring the NOAA Global Surface Summary of Day dataset, which provides environmental measures from various locations all over the earth. The datasets used in this post are public datasets hosted in the following Amazon S3 locations:
- Parquet data for year 2020 –
s3://athena-examples-us-east-1/athenasparkblog/noaa-gsod-pds/parquet/2020/ - Parquet data for year 2021 –
s3://athena-examples-us-east-1/athenasparksqlblog/noaa_pq/year=2021/ - Parquet data from year 2022 –
s3://athena-examples-us-east-1/athenasparksqlblog/noaa_pq/year=2022/
To use this data, we need an AWS Glue Data Catalog database that acts as the metastore for Athena, allowing us to create external tables that point to the location of datasets in Amazon S3. First, we create a database in the Data Catalog using Athena and Spark.
Create a database
Run following SQL in your notebook using %%sql magic:
You get the following output:

Create a table
Now that we have created a database in the Data Catalog, we can create a partitioned table that points to our dataset stored in Amazon S3:
This dataset is partitioned by year, meaning that we store data files for each year separately, which simplifies management and improves performance because we can target the specific S3 locations in a query. The Data Catalog knows about the table, and now we’ll let it work out how many partitions we have automatically by using the MSCK utility:
When the preceding statement is complete, you can run the following command to list the yearly partitions that were found in the table:

Now that we have the table created and partitions added, let’s run a query to find the minimum recorded temperature for the 'SEATTLE TACOMA AIRPORT, WA US' location:

Query a cross-account Data Catalog from Athena Spark
Athena supports accessing cross-account AWS Glue Data Catalogs, which enables you to use Spark SQL in Athena Spark to query a Data Catalog in an authorized AWS account.
The cross-account Data Catalog access pattern is often used in a data mesh architecture, when a data producer wants to share a catalog and data with consumer accounts. The consumer accounts can then perform data analysis and explorations on the shared data. This is a simplified model where we don’t need to use AWS Lake Formation data sharing. The following diagram gives an overview of how the setup works between one producer and one consumer account, which can be extended to multiple producer and consumer accounts.

You need to set up the right access policies on the Data Catalog of the producer account to enable cross-account access. Specifically, you must make sure the consumer account’s IAM role used to run Spark calculations on Athena has access to the cross-account Data Catalog and data in Amazon S3. For setup instructions, refer to Configuring cross-account AWS Glue access in Athena for Spark.
There are two ways the consumer account can access the cross-account Data Catalog from Athena Spark, depending on whether you are querying from one producer account or multiple.
Query a single producer table
If you are just querying data from a single producer’s AWS account, you can tell Athena Spark to only use that account’s catalog to resolve database objects. When using this option, you don’t have to modify the SQL because you’re configuring the AWS account ID at session level. To enable this method, edit the session and set the property "spark.hadoop.hive.metastore.glue.catalogid": "999999999999" using the following steps:
- In the notebook editor, on the Session menu, choose Edit session.

- Choose Edit in JSON.
- Add the following property and choose Save:
{"spark.hadoop.hive.metastore.glue.catalogid": "999999999999"}
This will start a new session with the updated parameters. - Run the following SQL statement in Spark to query tables from the producer account’s catalog:
Alternatively, you can add the producer AWS account ID in each database name, which is helpful if you’re going to query Data Catalogs from different owners. To enable this method, set the property {"spark.hadoop.aws.glue.catalog.separator": "/"} when invoking or editing the session (using the same steps as the previous section). Then, you add the AWS account ID for the source Data Catalog as part of the database name:
If the S3 bucket belonging to the producer AWS account is configured with Requester Pays enabled, the consumer is charged instead of the bucket owner for requests and downloads. In this case, you can add the following property when invoking or editing an Athena Spark session to read data from these buckets:
{"spark.hadoop.fs.s3.useRequesterPaysHeader": "true"}
Infer the schema of your data in Amazon S3 and join with tables crawled in the Data Catalog
Rather than only being able to go through the Data Catalog to understand the table structure, Spark can infer schema and read data directly from storage. This feature allows data analysts and data scientists to perform a quick exploration of the data without needing to create a database or table, but which can also be used with other existing tables stored in the Data Catalog in the same or across different accounts. To do this, we use a Spark temp view, which is an in-memory data structure that stores the schema of data stored in a data frame.
Using the NOAA dataset partition for 2020, we create a temporary view by reading S3 data into a data frame:
Now you can query the y20view using Spark SQL as if it were a Data Catalog database:

You can query data from both temporary views and Data Catalog tables in the same query in Spark. For example, now that we have a table containing data for years 2021 and 2022, and a temporary view with 2020’s data, we can find the dates in each year when the maximum temperature was recorded for 'SEATTLE TACOMA AIRPORT, WA US'.
To do this, we can use the window function and UNION:

Extend your SQL with a UDF in Spark SQL
You can extend your SQL functionality by registering and using a custom user-defined function in Athena Spark. These UDFs are used in addition to the common predefined functions available in Spark SQL, and once created, can be reused many times within a given session.
In this section, we walk through a straightforward UDF that converts a numeric month value into the full month name. You have the option to write the UDF in either Java or Python.
Java-based UDF
The Java code for the UDF can be found in the GitHub repository. For this post, we have uploaded a prebuilt JAR of the UDF to s3://athena-examples-us-east-1/athenasparksqlblog/udf/month_number_to_name.jar.
To register the UDF, we use Spark SQL to create a temporary function:

Python-based UDF
Now let’s see how to add a Python UDF to the existing Spark session. The Python code for the UDF can be found in the GitHub repository. For this post, the code has been uploaded to s3://athena-examples-us-east-1/athenasparksqlblog/udf/month_number_to_name.py.
Python UDFs can’t be registered in Spark SQL, so instead we use a small bit of PySpark code to add the Python file, import the function, and then register it as a UDF:
Plot visuals from the SQL queries
It’s straightforward to use Spark SQL, including across AWS accounts for data exploration, and not complicated to extend Athena Spark with UDFs. Now let’s see how we can go beyond SQL using Python to visualize data within the same Spark session to look for patterns in the data. We use the table and temporary views created previously to generate a pie chart that shows percentage of readings taken in each year for the station 'SEATTLE TACOMA AIRPORT, WA US'.
Let’s start by creating a Spark data frame from a SQL query and converting it to a pandas data frame:

Clean up
To clean up the resources created for this post, complete the following steps:
- Run the following SQL statements in the notebook’s cell to delete the database and tables from the Data Catalog:
- Delete the workgroup created for this post. This will also delete saved notebooks that are part of the workgroup.
- Delete the S3 bucket that you created as part of the workgroup.
Conclusion
Athena Spark makes it easier than ever to query databases and tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog directly through Spark SQL in Athena, and to query data directly from Amazon S3 without needing a metastore for quick data exploration. It also makes it straightforward to use common and advanced SQL commands used in Spark SQL, including registering UDFs for custom functionality. Additionally, Athena Spark makes it effortless to use Python in a fast start notebook environment to visualize and analyze data queried via Spark SQL.
Overall, Spark SQL unlocks the ability to go beyond standard SQL in Athena, providing advanced users more flexibility and power through both SQL and Python in a single integrated notebook, and providing fast, complex analysis of data in Amazon S3 without infrastructure setup. To learn more about Athena Spark, refer to Amazon Athena for Apache Spark.
About the Authors
Pathik Shah is a Sr. Analytics Architect on Amazon Athena. He joined AWS in 2015 and has been focusing in the big data analytics space since then, helping customers build scalable and robust solutions using AWS analytics services.
Raj Devnath is a Product Manager at AWS on Amazon Athena. He is passionate about building products customers love and helping customers extract value from their data. His background is in delivering solutions for multiple end markets, such as finance, retail, smart buildings, home automation, and data communication systems.

This will start a new session with the updated parameters.










Kartikay Khator is a Solutions Architect on the Global Life Science at Amazon Web Services. He is passionate about helping customers on their cloud journey with focus on AWS analytics services. He is an avid runner and enjoys hiking.
Kamen Sharlandjiev is a Sr. Big Data and ETL Solutions Architect and Amazon AppFlow expert. He’s on a mission to make life easier for customers who are facing complex data integration challenges. His secret weapon? Fully managed, low-code AWS services that can get the job done with minimal effort and no coding.
















Navnit Shuklaserves as an AWS Specialist Solution Architect with a focus on Analytics. He possesses a strong enthusiasm for assisting clients in discovering valuable insights from their data. Through his expertise, he constructs innovative solutions that empower businesses to arrive at informed, data-driven choices. Notably, Navnit Shukla is the accomplished author of the book titled “Data Wrangling on AWS.
Patrick Muller works as a Senior Data Lab Architect at AWS. His main responsibility is to assist customers in turning their ideas into a production-ready data product. In his free time, Patrick enjoys playing soccer, watching movies, and traveling.
Amogh Gaikwad is a Senior Solutions Developer at Amazon Web Services. He helps global customers build and deploy AI/ML solutions on AWS. His work is mainly focused on computer vision, and natural language processing and helping customers optimize their AI/ML workloads for sustainability. Amogh has received his master’s in Computer Science specializing in Machine Learning.
Sheela Sonone is a Senior Resident Architect at AWS. She helps AWS customers make informed choices and tradeoffs about accelerating their data, analytics, and AI/ML workloads and implementations. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her family – usually on tennis courts.












Ravi Itha is a Principal Consultant at AWS Professional Services with specialization in data and analytics and generalist background in application development. Ravi helps customers with enterprise data strategy initiatives across insurance, airlines, pharmaceutical, and financial services industries. In his 6-year tenure at Amazon, Ravi has helped the AWS builder community by publishing approximately 15 open-source solutions (accessible via
Srinivas Kandi is a Data Architect at AWS Professional Services. He leads customer engagements related to data lakes, analytics, and data warehouse modernizations. He enjoys reading history and civilizations.










Shubham Purwar is a Cloud Engineer (ETL) at AWS Bengaluru specialized in AWS Glue and Amazon Athena. He is passionate about helping customers solve issues related to their ETL workload and implement scalable data processing and analytics pipelines on AWS. In his free time, Shubham loves to spend time with his family and travel around the world.
Nitin Kumar is a Cloud Engineer (ETL) at AWS with a specialization in AWS Glue. He is dedicated to assisting customers in resolving issues related to their ETL workloads and creating scalable data processing and analytics pipelines on AWS.











Cristiane de Melo is a Solutions Architect Manager at AWS based in Bay Area, CA. She brings 25+ years of experience driving technical pre-sales engagements and is responsible for delivering results to customers. Cris is passionate about working with customers, solving technical and business challenges, thriving on building and establishing long-term, strategic relationships with customers and partners.
Archana Inapudi is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS supporting Strategic Customers. She has over a decade of experience helping customers design and build data analytics, and database solutions. She is passionate about using technology to provide value to customers and achieve business outcomes.
Nikita Sur is a Solutions Architect at AWS supporting a Strategic Customer. She is curious to learn new technologies to solve customer problems. She has a Master’s degree in Information Systems – Big Data Analytics and her passion is databases and analytics.
Zach Mitchell is a Sr. Big Data Architect. He works within the product team to enhance understanding between product engineers and their customers while guiding customers through their journey to develop their enterprise data architecture on AWS.






















Vijay Velpula is a Data Lake Architect with AWS Professional Services. He helps customers building modern data platforms through implementing Big Data & Analytics solutions. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with family, traveling, hiking and biking.
Karthikeyan Ramachandran is a Data Architect with AWS Professional Services. He specializes in MPP systems helping Customers build and maintain Data warehouse environments. Outside of work, he likes to binge-watch tv shows and loves playing cricket and volleyball.
Sriharsh Adari is a Senior Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he helps customers work backwards from business outcomes to develop innovative solutions on AWS. Over the years, he has helped multiple customers on data platform transformations across industry verticals. His core area of expertise include Technology Strategy, Data Analytics, and Data Science. In his spare time, he enjoys playing sports, binge-watching TV shows, and playing Tabla.

















Jonathan Wong is a Solutions Architect at AWS assisting with initiatives within Strategic Accounts. He is passionate about solving customer challenges and has been exploring emerging technologies to accelerate innovation.








Virendhar (Viru) Sivaraman is a strategic Senior Big Data & Analytics Architect with Amazon Web Services. He is passionate about building scalable big data and analytics solutions in the cloud. Besides work, he enjoys spending time with family, hiking & mountain biking.
Vivek Shrivastava is a Principal Data Architect, Data Lake in AWS Professional Services. He is a Bigdata enthusiast and holds 14 AWS Certifications. He is passionate about helping customers build scalable and high-performance data analytics solutions in the cloud. In his spare time, he loves reading and finds areas for home automation.






















Raj Ramasubbu is a Sr. Analytics Specialist Solutions Architect focused on big data and analytics and AI/ML with Amazon Web Services. He helps customers architect and build highly scalable, performant, and secure cloud-based solutions on AWS. Raj provided technical expertise and leadership in building data engineering, big data analytics, business intelligence, and data science solutions for over 18 years prior to joining AWS. He helped customers in various industry verticals like healthcare, medical devices, life science, retail, asset management, car insurance, residential REIT, agriculture, title insurance, supply chain, document management, and real estate.
Rahul Sonawane is a Principal Analytics Solutions Architect at AWS with AI/ML and Analytics as his area of specialty.
Sundeep Kumar is a Sr. Data Architect, Data Lake at AWS, helping customers build data lake and analytics platform and solutions. When not building and designing data lakes, Sundeep enjoys listening music and playing guitar.







Thomas Burns,
Aileen Zheng is a Solutions Architect supporting US Federal Civilian Sciences customers at Amazon Web Services (AWS). She partners with customers to provide technical guidance on enterprise cloud adoption and strategy and helps with building well-architected solutions. She is also very passionate about data analytics and machine learning. In her free time, you’ll find Aileen doing pilates, taking her dog Mumu out for a hike, or hunting down another good spot for food! You’ll also see her contributing to projects to support diversity and women in technology.







Pathik Shah is a Sr. Big Data Architect on Amazon Athena. He joined AWS in 2015 and has been focusing in the big data analytics space since then, helping customers build scalable and robust solutions using AWS analytics services.
Eliad Gat is a Big Data & AI/ML Architect at Orca Security. He has over 15 years of experience designing and building large-scale cloud-native distributed systems, specializing in big data, analytics, AI, and machine learning.
Oded Lifshiz is a Principal Software Engineer at Orca Security. He enjoys combining his passion for delivering innovative, data-driven solutions with his expertise in designing and building large-scale machine learning pipelines.
Yonatan Dolan is a Principal Analytics Specialist at Amazon Web Services. He is located in Israel and helps customers harness AWS analytical services to leverage data, gain insights, and derive value. Yonatan also leads the Apache Iceberg Israel community.
Carlos Rodrigues is a Big Data Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. He helps customers worldwide build transactional data lakes on AWS using open table formats like Apache Hudi and Apache Iceberg.
Sofia Zilberman is a Sr. Analytics Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. She has a track record of 15 years of creating large-scale, distributed processing systems. She remains passionate about big data technologies and architecture trends, and is constantly on the lookout for functional and technological innovations.






Abdul Qadir is an AWS Solutions Architect based in New Jersey. He works with independent software vendors in the Northeast and provides customer guidance to build well-architected solutions on the AWS cloud platform.
Sharon Li is a solutions architect at AWS, based in the Boston, MA area. She works with enterprise customers, helping them solve difficult problems and build on AWS. Outside of work, she likes to spend time with her family and explore local restaurants.



Jacques Steyn runs the Altron Data Analytics Professional Services. He has been leading the building of data warehouses and analytic solutions for the past 20 years. In his free time, he spends time with his family, whether it be on the golf , walking in the mountains, or camping in South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia.
Jason Yung is a Principal Analytics Specialist with Amazon Web Services. Working with Senior Executives across the Europe and Asia-Pacific Regions, he helps customers become data-driven by understanding their use cases and articulating business value through Amazon mechanisms. In his free time, he spends time looking after a very active 1-year-old daughter, alongside juggling geeky activities with respectable hobbies such as cooking sub-par food.
Michele Lamarca is a Senior Solutions Architect with Amazon Web Services. He helps architect and run Solutions Accelerators in Europe to enable customers to become hands-on with AWS services and build prototypes quickly to release the value of data in the organization. In his free time, he reads books and tries (hopelessly) to improve his jazz piano skills.
Hamza is a Specialist Solutions Architect with Amazon Web Services. He runs Solutions Accelerators in EMEA regions to help customers accelerate their journey to move from an idea into a solution in production. In his free time, he spends time with his family, meets with friends, swims in the municipal swimming pool, and learns new skills.





























Rajdip Chaudhuri is a Senior Solutions Architect with Amazon Web Services specializing in data and analytics. He enjoys working with AWS customers and partners on data and analytics requirements. In his spare time, he enjoys soccer and movies.
Dhiraj Thakur is a Solutions Architect with Amazon Web Services. He works with AWS customers and partners to provide guidance on enterprise cloud adoption, migration, and strategy. He is passionate about technology and enjoys building and experimenting in the analytics and AI/ML space.



























Nishchai JM is an Analytics Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web services. He specializes in building Big-data applications and help customer to modernize their applications on Cloud. He thinks Data is new oil and spends most of his time in deriving insights out of the Data.
Varad Ram is Senior Solutions Architect in Amazon Web Services. He likes to help customers adopt to cloud technologies and is particularly interested in artificial intelligence. He believes deep learning will power future technology growth. In his spare time, he like to be outdoor with his daughter and son.
Narendra Gupta is a Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, helping customers on their cloud journey with a focus on AWS analytics services. Outside of work, Narendra enjoys learning new technologies, watching movies, and visiting new places
Arun A K is a Big Data Solutions Architect with AWS. He works with customers to provide architectural guidance for running analytics solutions on the cloud. In his free time, Arun loves to enjoy quality time with his family



