Amazon Athena: no viable entry alternative

Question

When creating a table in Athena; this gives me the following exception:

no viable input alternative

Answer 1

hyphens are not allowed in the table name .. (although the wizard allows this). Just remove the hyphen and it works like a charm

Answer 2

Unfortunately, at the moment, syntax checking error messages are not very descriptive in Athena, this error can mean "almost" any possible syntax errors in the create table statement.

Although this is annoying at the moment, you will need to check if the syntax should follow Create table .

Some examples:

• Backticks out of place (as already indicated)
• Missing / extra commas (remember that the last column does not need a comma after defining the column
• Missing spaces
• Read more ..

Answer 3

This error usually occurs when there are some dumb errors in the DDL syntax. There are several answers explaining different errors depending on their condition. A simple solution to this problem is to patiently examine DDL and check the following points line by line: -

1. Check for Missed Commas
2. Unbalanced "(backstop operator)
3. Incompatible data type not supported by HIVE ( LINK TO HIVE DATA TYPES )
4. Unbalanced comma
5. Hypen in the table title

Answer 4

In my case, it was due to the comma after the last column in the table. For example:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE IF NOT EXISTS my_table ( one STRING, two STRING, ) LOCATION 's3://my-bucket/some/path'; 

After I removed the comma at the end of two STRING, it worked fine.

Answer 5

In my case, it was an extra comma in the PARTITIONED BY section,

Answer 6

In my case, I was missing the only values ​​for the S3 URL

Answer 7

In my case, it was that one of the table column names was enclosed in single quotes according to the AWS documentation :( ('bucket')

Answer 8

My case: it was an external table, and there was a typo in this place (therefore, it was not)

A couple of tips:

• Click the "Request Format" button so you can easily find errors
• Use the example at the bottom of the documentation - it works - and change it with your settings: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/create-table.html