Glue table partition keys should be set to empty list instead of being unset

[f0rk]

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Terraform Version

Terraform v0.11.1

• provider.aws v1.24.0

Affected Resource(s)

• aws_glue_catalog_table

Terraform Configuration Files

resource "aws_glue_catalog_table" "test" {
...
partition_keys = []
...
}

Expected Behavior

Partition keys should be set to an empty list.

Actual Behavior

Partition keys is unset.

Steps to Reproduce

1. terraform apply

Important Factoids

I originally opened a support request with AWS because a view I was trying to create could not be queried. This was their response:

The issue could be caused by a bug in Athena views that the table property partitionKeys is not set when creating the table since they are not required parameters. I can reproduce the behavior and setting the partitionKeys as an empty list can mitigate the issue. I checked the tables in the views and confirmed that they have no partitionKeys property. Could you try this workaround and see if the issue still exists? Athena team is actively working to address the issue and the error message since it doesn't provide any useful information. Apologies for the inconvenience caused to you.

[f0rk]

I've tried to fix this issue, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to convince Terraform that an empty list is a value, and not no value at all. It seems many places in the code think that 0, "", [], etc. are no value at all. So when I hardcode an empty list to be set for partition keys, Terraform reports that the attribute is not set. Any ideas about how to work around this?

[rooozox]

Hitting this problem as well today. Any known workaround? (using terraform v0.12.2, aws provider v2.41)

[gmazelier]

Same here. Made a quick local test: it seems that explicitly having an empty list for the partition keys fix the problem. Having nil does not behave the same when serialising. This need more test but I will a pull request soon.

[ghost]

This has been released in version 3.23.0 of the Terraform AWS provider. Please see the Terraform documentation on provider versioning or reach out if you need any assistance upgrading.

For further feature requests or bug reports with this functionality, please create a new GitHub issue following the template for triage. Thanks!

[ghost]

I'm going to lock this issue because it has been closed for 30 days ⏳. This helps our maintainers find and focus on the active issues.

If you feel this issue should be reopened, we encourage creating a new issue linking back to this one for added context. Thanks!