# Use SerDes
<a name="serde-reference"></a>

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)](ctas.md).

**Topics**
+ [Choose a SerDe for your data](supported-serdes.md)
+ [Use a SerDe to create a table](serde-create-a-table.md)
+ [Amazon Ion Hive SerDe](ion-serde.md)
+ [Avro SerDe](avro-serde.md)
+ [Grok SerDe](grok-serde.md)
+ [JSON SerDe libraries](json-serde.md)
+ [CSV SerDe libraries](serde-csv-choices.md)
+ [ORC SerDe](orc-serde.md)
+ [Parquet SerDe](parquet-serde.md)
+ [Regex SerDe](regex-serde.md)