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AWS Documentation » Amazon Athena » User Guide » SerDe Reference » Supported SerDes and Data Formats » OpenCSVSerDe for Processing CSV
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OpenCSVSerDe for Processing CSV

When you create a table from CSV data in Athena, determine what types of values it contains:

  • If data contains values enclosed in double quotes ("), you can use the OpenCSV SerDe to deserialize the values in Athena. In the following sections, note the behavior of this SerDe with STRING data types.

  • If data does not contain values enclosed in double quotes ("), you can omit specifying any SerDe. In this case, Athena uses the default LazySimpleSerDe. For information, see LazySimpleSerDe for CSV, TSV, and Custom-Delimited Files.

CSV SerDe (OpenCSVSerDe)

The OpenCSV SerDe behaves as follows:

  • Converts all column type values to STRING.

  • To recognize data types other than STRING, relies on the Presto parser and converts the values from STRING into those data types if it can recognize them.

  • Uses double quotes (") as the default quote character, and allows you to specify separator, quote, and escape characters, such as: 

    WITH SERDEPROPERTIES ("separatorChar" = ",", "quoteChar" = "`", "escapeChar" = "\\" )

  • Cannot escape \t or \n directly. To escape them, use "escapeChar" = "\\". See the example in this topic.

  • Does not support embedded line breaks in CSV files.

Note

When you use Athena with OpenCSVSerDe, the SerDe converts all column types to STRING. Next, the parser in Athena parses the values from STRING into actual types based on what it finds. For example, it parses the values into BOOLEAN, BIGINT, INT, and DOUBLE data types when it can discern them. If the values are in TIMESTAMP in the UNIX format, Athena parses them as TIMESTAMP. If the values are in TIMESTAMP in Hive format, Athena parses them as INT. DATE type values are also parsed as INT.

To further convert columns to the desired type in a table, you can create a view over the table and use CAST to convert to the desired type.

For data types other than STRING, when the parser in Athena can recognize them, this SerDe behaves as follows:

  • Recognizes BOOLEAN, BIGINT, INT, and DOUBLE data types and parses them without changes.

  • Recognizes the TIMESTAMP type if it is specified in the UNIX format, such as yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss[.f...], as the type LONG.

  • Does not support TIMESTAMP in the JDBC-compliant java.sql.Timestamp format, such as "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.fffffffff" (9 decimal place precision). If you are processing CSV data from Hive, use the UNIX format for TIMESTAMP.

  • Recognizes the DATE type if it is specified in the UNIX format, such as YYYY-MM-DD, as the type LONG.

  • Does not support DATE in another format. If you are processing CSV data from Hive, use the UNIX format for DATE.

Example: Escaping \t or \n

Consider the following test data:

" \\t\\t\\n 123 \\t\\t\\n ",abc
" 456 ",xyz

The following statement creates a table in Athena, specifying that "escapeChar" = "\\". 

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE test1 (
f1 string,
s2 string) 
ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.OpenCSVSerde' 
WITH SERDEPROPERTIES ("separatorChar" = ",", "escapeChar" = "\\") 
LOCATION 's3://user-test-region/dataset/test1/'

Next, run the following query: 

select * from test1;

It returns this result, correctly escaping \t or \n: 

f1            s2
\t\t\n 123 \t\t\n            abc
456                          xyz

SerDe Name

CSV SerDe

Library Name

To use this SerDe, specify its fully qualified class name in ROW FORMAT. Also specify the delimiters inside SERDEPROPERTIES, as follows: 

...
ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.OpenCSVSerde'
WITH SERDEPROPERTIES (
  "separatorChar" = ",",
  "quoteChar"     = "`",
  "escapeChar"    = "\\"
)

Example

This example presumes data in CSV saved in s3://mybucket/mycsv/ with the following contents: 

"a1","a2","a3","a4"
"1","2","abc","def"
"a","a1","abc3","ab4"

Use a CREATE TABLE statement to create an Athena table based on the data, and reference the OpenCSVSerDe class in ROW FORMAT, also specifying SerDe properties for character separator, quote character, and escape character, as follows: 

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE myopencsvtable (
   col1 string,
   col2 string,
   col3 string,
   col4 string
)
ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.OpenCSVSerde'
WITH SERDEPROPERTIES (
   'separatorChar' = ',',
   'quoteChar' = '"',
   'escapeChar' = '\\'
   )
STORED AS TEXTFILE
LOCATION 's3://location/of/csv/';

Query all values in the table:

SELECT * FROM myopencsvtable;

The query returns the following values:

col1     col2    col3    col4
-----------------------------
a1       a2      a3      a4
1        2       abc     def
a        a1      abc3    ab4

Note

The flight table data comes from Flights provided by US Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Desaturated from original.

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