Amazon Web Services Data-Engineer-Associate Exam With Confidence Using Practice Dumps

The problem likely arises from Athena not being able to read from the correct S3 location or missing partitions. The two most relevant troubleshooting steps involve checking the S3 location and repairing the table metadata.

A. Confirm that Athena is pointing to the correct Amazon S3 location:

One of the most common issues with missing data in Athena queries is that the query is pointed to an incorrect or outdated S3 location. Checking the S3 path ensures Athena is querying the correct data.

In Amazon Athena, you can use CREATE TABLE AS SELECT with WITH NO DATA to create an empty copy of an existing table’s schema:

“The query CREATE TABLE new_table AS SELECT * FROM old_table WITH NO DATA; creates a new table with the same schema but without copying over the data.”

– Ace the AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate Certification - version 2 - apple.pdf

This is the most efficient way to create an empty version of the existing table.

Option A minimizes administration because it keeps one base IAM role for the pipeline and enforces regional locality at session time by attaching a session policy when the broker calls AssumeRole. This aligns with the security best practice of applying only what is necessary, because permissions should be limited to the exact scope required for the session. The material explicitly emphasizes the principle of least privilege, stating that permissions “should apply only to what is necessary,” and the most appropriate approach is to grant only the minimum actions needed for the job.

With session policies, the organization avoids creating and maintaining separate per-Region roles (Option B), avoids managing users and group memberships for federated sessions (Option C), and avoids individually attaching policies per engineer (Option D). Instead, the broker can dynamically apply a Region-specific restriction for each login, ensuring the temporary credentials are valid only for the engineer’s working Region. This design reduces ongoing operational burden while still enforcing strict locality controls through temporary, scoped credentials and least-privilege boundaries.