partitioning s3 access logs to optimize athena queries

Question

Hi,

When enabling s3 access logs on a bucket, there is this great feature that the generated logs can be queried through Athena.
One thing I can however not figure out, is how to partition the external table so I can limit the data scanned e.g. by date.

The generated file structure is like
* s3://my-access-logs/2022-02-15-11-11-18-6E829E27FAAA289A
* s3://my-access-logs/2022-02-15-11-11-19-2870C85C7E0D2B20
* ..
* s3://my-access-logs/2022-02-16-11-01-01-6E829E27FAAA289A
* ...

I added a "PARTITIONED BY (dt string)" to my table creation DDL, and then added partition like 
> ALTER TABLE my_logs_table ADD PARTITION (dt = '2022-02-15') location 's3://my-access-logs/2022-02-15'

However, when querying the table no data is scanned, and no rows are returned (even if I don't specify a filter on dt in my query).

Most examples I could find always deal with s3 structures where there is a hierarchical folder structure, like 2022/02/15/xxx

Anybody has any solution for this?

Thanks,
Bert

Answer

You need to create partitions, this can be achieved by writing a simple AWS Lambda code.

Event based serverless architecture:
S3 Access Log Bucket (PUT event notification) --> SQS  --> Lambda in batch mode of 10 (Parses file name and perform S3 copy while adding partition prefix)

For example:
Input: s3://my-access-logs/2022-02-15-11-11-18-6E829E27FAAA289A
Output: 
* Option-1 s3://my-access-logs/pt_date=2022-02-15/2022-02-15-11-11-18-6E829E27FAAA289A
* Option-2 s3://my-access-logs/year=2022/month=02/day=15/hour=11/2022-02-15-11-11-18-6E829E27FAAA289A

Additionally, you can have aggressive s3 "Lifecycle Policy" to delete the original logs in 1 day to save on storage costs.

Once this is done, you can register Athena table with HIVE partitions and query it seamlessly.

Alternatively, there is this blog which utilized Glue to perform this in a batch mode - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/easily-query-aws-service-logs-using-amazon-athena/

partitioning s3 access logs to optimize athena queries

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