Querying custom attributes in Athena - json

Question

I apologize in advance if this is very simple and I am just missing it.
Would any of you know how to put custom attributes as column headers? I currently have a simple opt in survey on connect and I would like to have each of the 4 items as column headers and the score in the table results. I pull the data using an ODBC connection to excel so ideally I would like to just add this on the end of my current table if I can figure out how to do it.
This is how it currently looks in the output
{"effortscore":"5","promoterscore":"5","satisfactionscore":"5","survey_opt_in":"True"}
If you have any links or something that I can follow to try improve my knowledge.
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

There are multiple options to query data in JSON format in Athena, and based on your use case (data source, query frequency, query destination, etc.) you can choose what makes more sense.
String Column + JSON functions
This is usually the most straightforward option and a good starting point. You define the survey_output as a string column, and when you need to extract the specific attributes from the JSON string, you can apply the JSON functions in Trino/Athena: https://trino.io/docs/current/functions/json.html. For example:
SELECT
id,
json_query(
survey_output,
'lax $.satisfactionscore'
) AS satisfactionscore
FROM customers
String Column + JSON functions + View
The following way to simplify access to data without json_query functions is to define a VIEW on that table using the json_query syntax in the VIEW creation. You define the view once by a DBA, and when the users query the data, they see the columns they care about. For example:
CREATE VIEW survey_results AS
SELECT
id,
json_query(
survey_output,
'lax $.satisfactionscore'
) AS satisfactionscore
FROM customers;
With such dynamic view creation, you have more flexibility in what data will be easily exposed to the users.
Create a Table with STRUCT
Another option is to create the external table from the data source (files in S3, for example) with the STRUCT definition.
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE survey (
id string,
survey_results struct<
effortscore:string,
promoterscore:string,
satisfactionscore:string,
survey_opt_in:string
>
)
ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.openx.data.jsonserde.JsonSerDe'
LOCATION 's3://<YOUR BUCKET HERE>/<FILES>'