AWS Athena instructions not clear or wrong

[cbeddow]

When I run the queries:

1. if I run both the CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE and the MSCK REPAIR TABLE, I get line 1:8: mismatched input 'EXTERNAL'. Expecting: 'MATERIALIZED', 'OR', 'ROLE', 'SCHEMA', 'TABLE', 'VIEW'

2. The instructions say only one query at a time in Athena. So if I run just one part of that query, only CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE, then it works. But then I get no partitions loaded. Running MSCK REPAIR TABLE places; yields:

line 1:1: mismatched input 'MSCK'. Expecting: 'ALTER', 'ANALYZE', 'CALL', 'COMMENT', 'COMMIT', 'CREATE', 'DEALLOCATE', 'DELETE', 'DENY', 'DESC', 'DESCRIBE', 'DROP', 'EXECUTE', 'EXPLAIN', 'GRANT', 'INSERT', 'MERGE', 'PREPARE', 'REFRESH', 'RESET', 'REVOKE', 'ROLLBACK', 'SET', 'SHOW', 'START', 'TRUNCATE', 'UNLOAD', 'UPDATE', 'USE', <query>

3. If I also just click the places table options and click on Load partitions same result as in step 2

Conclusion: following the exact instructions does not yield expected results. If you do have a way around this, please let me know, but my expectation is that following the literal instructions should work here.

[cbeddow]

Adding: I am using on eu-central-2 region, because I want to copy data over to my region's RDS. Maybe this affects something but it's only indicated to use us-west-2 for best performance.

1. I am using Athena in eu-central-2
2. My s3 bucket I want to store results in is also eu-central-2

In Glue, I see that it has a query string then added to the s3 bucket path for the Places data that specifics eu-central-2 so maybe it's causing a bad request

[cbeddow]

Jennings Anderson (@jenningsanderson) do you know if region has effects on this? Should be a same problem with Daylight if trying to load different regions?

Edit: yes, you must be on the same region as the S3 bucket in the external table reference to be able to load partitions. Recommending we add to the instructions that you must be in us-west-2, otherwise first need to copy to your own other region bucket, unless there is another workaround.

[jenningsanderson]

Thanks Christopher Beddow (@cbeddow), added!