Athena supports several SerDe (Serializer/Deserializer) libraries that parse data from a variety of data formats. When you create a table in Athena, you can specify a SerDe that corresponds to the format that your data is in. Athena does not support custom SerDes.
Athena can use SerDe libraries to create tables from CSV, TSV, custom-delimited, and JSON formats; data from the Hadoop-related formats ORC, Avro, and Parquet; logs from Logstash, AWS CloudTrail logs, and Apache WebServer logs. Each of these data formats has one or more serializer-deserializer (SerDe) libraries that Athena can use to parse the data.
Note
The formats listed in this section are used by Athena for reading data. For information about formats that Athena uses for writing data when it runs CTAS queries, see Create a table from query results (CTAS).
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