SHOW PARTITIONS

Lists all the partitions in an Athena table in unsorted order.

Synopsis

SHOW PARTITIONS table_name

• To show the partitions in a table and list them in a specific order, see the List partitions for a specific table section on the Query the AWS Glue Data Catalog page.

• To view the contents of a partition, see the Query the data section on the Partition your data page.

• SHOW PARTITIONS does not list partitions that are projected by Athena but not registered in the AWS Glue catalog. For information about partition projection, see Use partition projection with Amazon Athena.

• SHOW PARTITIONS lists the partitions in metadata, not the partitions in the actual file system. To update the metadata after you delete partitions manually in Amazon S3, run ALTER TABLE DROP PARTITION.

Examples

The following example query shows the partitions for the flight_delays_csv table, which shows flight table data from the US Department of Transportation. For more information about the example flight_delays_csv table, see Lazy Simple SerDe for CSV, TSV, and custom-delimited files. The table is partitioned by year.

SHOW PARTITIONS flight_delays_csv

Results

year=2007
year=2015
year=1999
year=1993
year=1991
year=2003
year=1996
year=2014
year=2004
year=2011
...

The following example query shows the partitions for the impressions table, which contains sample web browsing data. For more information about the example impressions table, see Partition your data. The table is partitioned by the dt (datetime) column.

SHOW PARTITIONS impressions

Results

dt=2009-04-12-16-00
dt=2009-04-13-18-15
dt=2009-04-14-00-20
dt=2009-04-12-13-00
dt=2009-04-13-02-15
dt=2009-04-14-12-05
dt=2009-04-14-06-15
dt=2009-04-12-21-15
dt=2009-04-13-22-15
...

Listing partitions in sorted order

To order the partitions in the results list, use the following SELECT syntax instead of SHOW PARTITIONS.

SELECT * FROM database_name."table_name$partitions" ORDER BY column_name

The following query shows the list of partitions for the flight_delays_csv example, but in sorted order.

SELECT * FROM "flight_delays_csv$partitions" ORDER BY year

Results

year
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
...

For more information, see the List partitions for a specific table section on the Query the AWS Glue Data Catalog page.