Querying data in place with Amazon S3 Select - Amazon Simple Storage Service
Requirements and limitsConstructing a requestErrors

Querying data in place with Amazon S3 Select

Important

Amazon S3 Select is no longer available to new customers. Existing customers of Amazon S3 Select can continue to use the feature as usual. Learn more

With Amazon S3 Select, you can use structured query language (SQL) statements to filter the contents of an Amazon S3 object and retrieve only the subset of data that you need. By using Amazon S3 Select to filter this data, you can reduce the amount of data that Amazon S3 transfers, which reduces the cost and latency to retrieve this data.

Amazon S3 Select only allows you to query one object at a time. It works on an object stored in CSV, JSON, or Apache Parquet format. It also works with an object that is compressed with GZIP or BZIP2 (for CSV and JSON objects only), and a server-side encrypted object. You can specify the format of the results as either CSV or JSON, and you can determine how the records in the result are delimited.

You pass SQL expressions to Amazon S3 in the request. Amazon S3 Select supports a subset of SQL. For more information about the SQL elements that are supported by Amazon S3 Select, see SQL reference for Amazon S3 Select.

You can perform SQL queries by using the Amazon S3 console, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), the SelectObjectContent REST API operation, or the AWS SDKs.

Note

The Amazon S3 console limits the amount of data returned to 40 MB. To retrieve more data, use the AWS CLI or the API.

Requirements and limits

The following are requirements for using Amazon S3 Select:

  • You must have s3:GetObject permission for the object you are querying.

  • If the object you are querying is encrypted with server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C), you must use https, and you must provide the encryption key in the request.

The following limits apply when using Amazon S3 Select:

  • S3 Select can query only one object per request.

  • The maximum length of a SQL expression is 256 KB.

  • The maximum length of a record in the input or result is 1 MB.

  • Amazon S3 Select can only emit nested data by using the JSON output format.

  • You cannot query an object stored in the S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, S3 Glacier Deep Archive, or Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) storage classes. You also cannot query an object stored in the S3 Intelligent-Tiering Archive Access tier or the S3 Intelligent-Tiering Deep Archive Access tier. For more information about storage classes, see Understanding and managing Amazon S3 storage classes.

Additional limitations apply when using Amazon S3 Select with a Parquet object:

  • Amazon S3 Select supports only columnar compression using GZIP or Snappy. Amazon S3 Select doesn't support whole-object compression for a Parquet object.

  • Amazon S3 Select doesn't support Parquet output. You must specify the output format as CSV or JSON.

  • The maximum uncompressed row group size is 512 MB.

  • You must use the data types that are specified in the object's schema.

  • Selecting on a repeated field returns only the last value.

Constructing a request

When you construct a request, you provide details of the object that is being queried by using an InputSerialization object. You provide details of how the results are to be returned by using an OutputSerialization object. You also include the SQL expression that Amazon S3 uses to filter the request.

For more information about constructing an Amazon S3 Select request, see SelectObjectContent in the Amazon Simple Storage Service API Reference. You can also see one of the SDK code examples in the following sections.

Requests using scan ranges

With Amazon S3 Select, you can scan a subset of an object by specifying a range of bytes to query. This capability lets you parallelize scanning the whole object by splitting the work into separate Amazon S3 Select requests for a series of non-overlapping scan ranges.

Scan ranges don't need to be aligned with record boundaries. An Amazon S3 Select scan range request runs across the byte range that you specify. A record that starts within the specified scan range but extends beyond that scan range will be processed by the query. For example, the following shows an Amazon S3 object that contains a series of records in a line-delimited CSV format:

A,B
C,D
D,E
E,F
G,H
I,J

Suppose that you're using the Amazon S3 Select ScanRange parameter and Start at (Byte) 1 and End at (Byte) 4. So the scan range would start at "," and scan until the end of the record starting at C. Your scan range request will return the result C, D because that is the end of the record.

Amazon S3 Select scan range requests support Parquet, CSV (without quoted delimiters), or JSON objects (in LINES mode only). CSV and JSON objects must be uncompressed. For line-based CSV and JSON objects, when a scan range is specified as part of the Amazon S3 Select request, all records that start within the scan range are processed. For Parquet objects, all of the row groups that start within the scan range requested are processed.

Amazon S3 Select scan range requests are available to use with the AWS CLI, Amazon S3 API, and AWS SDKs. You can use the ScanRange parameter in the Amazon S3 Select request for this feature. For more information, see SelectObjectContent in the Amazon Simple Storage Service API Reference.

Errors

Amazon S3 Select returns an error code and associated error message when an issue is encountered while attempting to run a query. For a list of error codes and descriptions, see the List of SELECT Object Content Error Codes section of the Error Responses page in the Amazon Simple Storage Service API Reference.

For more information about Amazon S3 Select, see the following topics.

Topics