Why does Athena report "The specified key does not exist" when inserting to an Iceberg table?

Question

I'm creating an Iceberg table in Athena like this:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS table1 (`col1` string, `col2` string) 
LOCATION 's3://my-bucket/path/table1/'
TBLPROPERTIES ('table_type'='ICEBERG', 'format'='parquet')

and then trying to insert values into that table, like this:

INSERT INTO table1 VALUES ('hello', 'iceberg')

I'm encountering an error like this:

GENERIC_INTERNAL_ERROR:
io.trino.hdfs.s3.TrinoS3FileSystem$UnrecoverableS3OperationException:
com.amazonaws.services.s3.model.AmazonS3Exception:
The specified key does not exist. (Service: Amazon S3; Status Code: 404; Error Code: NoSuchKey; Request ...

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

The location is being set incorrectly, and should not include a trailing /.

Verify this by checking aws s3 ls s3://my-bucket/path/table1/ --recursive. If you see a key with //, such as s3://my-bucket/path/table1//metadata/..., you have encountered this problem. The // is a helpful indication that you've included an extra /.

Simply create the table without the trailing / in the location.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS table1 (`col1` string, `col2` string) 
LOCATION 's3://my-bucket/path/table1'
TBLPROPERTIES ('table_type'='ICEBERG', 'format'='parquet')