Creating databases and tables

Amazon Athena supports a subset of data definition language (DDL) statements and ANSI SQL functions and operators to define and query external tables where data resides in Amazon Simple Storage Service.

When you create a database and table in Athena, you describe the schema and the location of the data, making the data in the table ready for real-time querying.

To improve query performance and reduce costs, we recommend that you partition your data and use open source columnar formats for storage in Amazon S3, such as Apache parquet or ORC.

Topics

• Creating databases
• Creating tables
• Names for tables, databases, and columns
• Reserved keywords
• Table location in Amazon S3
• Columnar storage formats
• Partitioning data
• Partition projection