How to start an AWS Glue Crawler to refresh Athena tables using boto3

AWS gives us a few ways to refresh the Athena table partitions. We can use the user interface, run the MSCK REPAIR TABLE statement using Hive, or use a Glue Crawler. This article will show you how to create a new crawler and use it to refresh an Athena table.

Table of Contents

Creating a new crawler
Starting a crawler
Waiting until a crawler finishes running

First, we have to install, import boto3, and create a glue client

import boto3

glue = boto3.client('glue', aws_access_key_id=aws_access_key_id, aws_secret_access_key=aws_secret_access_key)

If the crawler already exists, we can reuse it. To get the existing crawler, we have to use the get_crawler function. Note that, instead of returning a null, the function raises an EntityNotFoundException if there is no crawler with a given name. We will not use the instance returned by the get_crawler function. We call it just to check whether we should create the crawler or not.

try:
    glue.get_crawler(Name=crawler_name)
except glue.exceptions.EntityNotFoundException:
    # the crawler does not exist

Creating a new crawler

To create a new crawler which refreshes table partitions, we need a few information:

the database and the name of the existing Athena table
the desired behavior in case of schema changes
the IAM role that allows the crawler to access the files in S3 and modify the Glue Data Catalog

Let’s start with crawler targets. In this example, we want to refresh tables which are already defined in the Glue Data Catalog, so we are going to use the CatalogTargets property and leave other targets empty:

table_names = [{'DatabaseName': 'schema_name', 'Tables': ['table_A', 'table_B']}]
crawler_targets = {'S3Targets': [], 'JdbcTargets': [], 'DynamoDBTargets': [], 'CatalogTargets': table_names}

In addition to that, we want to detect and add a new partition/column, but we don’t want to remove anything automatically, so our SchemaChangePolicy should look like this:

schema_change_policy = {'UpdateBehavior': 'UPDATE_IN_DATABASE', 'DeleteBehavior': 'LOG'}

We also have to instruct the crawler to use the table metadata when adding or updating the columns (so it does not change the types of the columns) and combine all partitions’ schemas. It will allow us to remove a column in the future without breaking the schema (we will get nulls when the data is missing).

crawler_config = '''{
    "Version":1.0,
    "CrawlerOutput":{"Partitions":{"AddOrUpdateBehavior":"InheritFromTable"}},
    "Grouping":{"TableGroupingPolicy":"CombineCompatibleSchemas"}}
    '''

Finally, we can create a new crawler:

glue.create_crawler(Name=crawler_name,
                    Role=glue_crawler_service_role,
                    DatabaseName=database_name, Description='some description',
                    Targets=crawler_targets, Classifiers=[], TablePrefix='',
                    SchemaChangePolicy=schema_change_policy,
                    Configuration=crawler_config)

Starting a crawler

Starting a crawler is trivial. All we have to do is calling the start_crawler function:

glue.start_crawler(Name=crawler_name)

If the crawler is already running, we will get the CrawlerRunningException.

Waiting until a crawler finishes running

If we want to wait until a crawler finishes its job, we should check the status of the crawler:

crawler_status = glue.get_crawler(Name=crawler_name)['Crawler']['State']
finished =  crawler_status == 'READY'

We can run this code in a loop, but make sure that it has a second exit condition (for example, waiting no longer than 10 minutes in total) in case the crawler gets stuck.

How to start an AWS Glue Crawler to refresh Athena tables using boto3

Creating a new crawler

Starting a crawler

Waiting until a crawler finishes running

How to retrieve the table descriptions from Glue Data Catalog using boto3

How to use AWSAthenaOperator in Airflow to verify that a DAG finished successfully

How to start an AWS Glue Crawler to refresh Athena tables using boto3

Creating a new crawler

Starting a crawler

Waiting until a crawler finishes running

How to retrieve the table descriptions from Glue Data Catalog using boto3

How to use AWSAthenaOperator in Airflow to verify that a DAG finished successfully

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