Athena - COLUMN_NOT_FOUND: line 1:8: Column 'description' cannot be resolved

Question

When querying Iceberg tables using Athena I am encountering the below errors.

**Example query:** SELECT * FROM "db"."table" limit 10;
**Error:** SYNTAX_ERROR: line 1:8: SELECT * not allowed from relation that has no columns

**Example query:**  SELECT id FROM "db"."table" limit 10;
**Error:** COLUMN_NOT_FOUND: line 1:8: Column 'id' cannot be resolved

The table schema can be seen when running DESCRIBE. The same behaviour is encountered for all 30 tables in the one database and was was working fine on 2022-10-21.

I am not using Lake Formation, only Glue Data Catalog. Does anyone have any ideas?

Answer

I never found a root cause to the issue but it now seems to be working again (in Version 2 of the Athena engine only).

Version 3 of the Athena engine still encounters the same issues.

Answer

I solved this problem by granting the right permission to my account or IAM role on Data Lake permission at Lake Formation. 
This has nothing to do with Athena's Version. Just be careful which one you use when you log into AWS. your account or IAM role, you need to assign the permission to the right one.
This one is related to COLUMN_NOT_FOUND: line 1:8: and SYNTAX_ERROR: line 1:8: SELECT * not allowed from relation that has no columns.

Athena - COLUMN_NOT_FOUND: line 1:8: Column 'description' cannot be resolved

Relevant content