---
title: "How to check when an Athena table was updated"
description: "How to track the time when an Athena table was updated"
author: "Bartosz Mikulski"
author_bio: "Principal AI Engineer & MLOps Architect. I bridge the gap between \"it works in a notebook\" and \"it works for 200 million users.\""
author_url: https://mikulskibartosz.name
author_linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikulskibartosz/
author_github: https://github.com/mikulskibartosz
canonical_url: https://mikulskibartosz.name/check-when-athena-table-was-updated
---

This article will show you how to get a notification when an Athena table is updated. For example, when someone writes a file to the S3 location that is used as the source of the Athena table.

To get the notification, I will implement an AWS Lambda function that gets triggered by a CloudWatch event. Here is the Serverless configuration that triggers the function:

```yaml
events:
    - cloudwatchEvent:
        event:
        source:
            - "aws.glue"
        detail-type:
            - "Glue Data Catalog Database State Change"
        detail:
            typeOfChange:
            - "updateTable"
```

In the Python function, I have to extract the event details to get the database and the table name:

```python
def main(event, context):
    database_name = event['requestParameters']['databaseName']
    table_name = event['requestParameters']['tableInput']['name']
    number_of_records = event['requestParameters']['tableInput']['parameters']['recordCount']
    update_time = event['eventTime']

    # here you can store the last update time in DynamoDB, send a notification to a Slack channel, or do whatever you want
```