CREATE DATABASE

Creates a database. The use of DATABASE and SCHEMA is interchangeable. They mean the same thing.

Note

For an example of creating a database, creating a table, and running a SELECT query on the table in Athena, see Get started.

Synopsis

CREATE {DATABASE|SCHEMA} [IF NOT EXISTS] database_name
  [COMMENT 'database_comment']
  [LOCATION 'S3_loc']
  [WITH DBPROPERTIES ('property_name' = 'property_value') [, ...]]

For restrictions on database names in Athena, see Name databases, tables, and columns.

Parameters

[IF NOT EXISTS]

Causes the error to be suppressed if a database named database_name already exists.

[COMMENT database_comment]

Establishes the metadata value for the built-in metadata property named comment and the value you provide for database_comment. In AWS Glue, the COMMENT contents are written to the Description field of the database properties.

[LOCATION S3_loc]

Specifies the location where database files and metastore will exist as S3_loc. The location must be an Amazon S3 location.

[WITH DBPROPERTIES ('property_name' = 'property_value') [, ...] ]

Allows you to specify custom metadata properties for the database definition.

Examples

CREATE DATABASE clickstreams;

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS clickstreams
  COMMENT 'Site Foo clickstream data aggregates'
  LOCATION 's3://amzn-s3-demo-bucket/clickstreams/'
  WITH DBPROPERTIES ('creator'='Jane D.', 'Dept.'='Marketing analytics');

Viewing database properties

To view the database properties for a database that you create in AWSDataCatalog using CREATE DATABASE, you can use the AWS CLI command aws glue get-database, as in the following example:

aws glue get-database --name <your-database-name>

In JSON output, the result looks like the following:

{
    "Database": {
        "Name": "<your-database-name>",
        "Description": "<your-database-comment>",
        "LocationUri": "s3://amzn-s3-demo-bucket",
        "Parameters": {
            "<your-database-property-name>": "<your-database-property-value>"
        },
        "CreateTime": 1603383451.0,
        "CreateTableDefaultPermissions": [
            {
                "Principal": {
                    "DataLakePrincipalIdentifier": "IAM_ALLOWED_PRINCIPALS"
                },
                "Permissions": [
                    "ALL"
                ]
            }
        ]
    }
}

For more information about the AWS CLI, see the AWS Command Line Interface User Guide.