Import: Amazon Athena

Creates a data contract from an Amazon Athena database, including column types, partition keys, and comments.

datacontract import athena \
  --schema my_database \
  --staging-dir s3://my-bucket/athena-results/ \
  --region eu-central-1 \
  --output datacontract.yaml

--schema is the Athena database. Repeat --table to import only specific tables (by default every table in the database is imported), and set --catalog if you don't use awsdatacatalog.

--staging-dir is the S3 location Athena writes query results to. datacontract test needs it, so the import writes it into the servers block.

Athena keeps its table metadata in the AWS Glue Data Catalog, so the import reads the catalog rather than querying Athena — it needs only glue:GetTables, costs nothing to run, and requires no query results to be staged. Glue stores the Hive spelling of two types, which the import rewrites to what Athena reports back (string → varchar, binary → varbinary) so the physical type checks pass on the first test run.

The generated contract includes a ready-to-test servers block, so you can run datacontract test datacontract.yaml immediately afterwards — see the Athena connection guide for the full 5-minute walkthrough and troubleshooting.

Credentials are provided as environment variables and are the same ones datacontract test uses: DATACONTRACT_S3_REGION, DATACONTRACT_S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID, and DATACONTRACT_S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY — see the Athena Reference.

Want the Glue Data Catalog itself rather than Athena? Use datacontract import glue.