How to use Boto3 to delete a specific version of table from AWS Glue Data catalog?

Problem Statement − Use boto3 library in Python to delete a table of specific version, created in your account.

Example − Delete a table 'security' version 1 from database 'test' that is created in your account.

Approach/Algorithm to solve this problem

Step 1 − Import boto3 and botocore exceptions to handle exceptions.

Step 2 − Pass the parameter database_name, table_name and version_id that should be deleted from AWS Glue Catalog.

Step 3 − Create an AWS session using boto3 library. Make sure region_name is mentioned in default profile. If it is not mentioned, then explicitly pass the region_name while creating the session.

Step 4 − Create an AWS client for glue.

Step 5 − Now use delete_table_version function and pass the database_name as DatabaseName parameter, table_name as TableName parameter and version_id as VersionId parameter. Please keep remember, VersionId is string so it should be passed in quotes and user can't delete latest version of a table. Only the old version of a table can be deleted if user wants to delete latest version then drop the table using function delete_table.

Step 6 − It will delete the old specific version of table and return the response metadata.

Step 7 − Handle the generic exception if something went wrong while checking the job.

Example

Use the following code to delete a specific version of table from AWS Glue database −

import boto3
from botocore.exceptions import ClientError

def delete_a_table_version_from_database(database_name, table_name, version_id: str):
    session = boto3.session.Session()
    glue_client = session.client('glue')
    try:
        response = glue_client.delete_table_version(
            DatabaseName=database_name, 
            Name=table_name, 
            VersionId=version_id
        )
        return response
    except ClientError as e:
        raise Exception("boto3 client error in delete_a_table_version_from_database: " + e.__str__())
    except Exception as e:
        raise Exception("Unexpected error in delete_a_table_version_from_database: " + e.__str__())

# Example usage
print(delete_a_table_version_from_database("test", "security", "1"))

Output

{'ResponseMetadata': {'RequestId': '7aa7c3cb-494e-b923-8610318a238c',
'HTTPStatusCode': 200, 'HTTPHeaders': {'date': 'Sun, 21 Feb 2021
04:58:04 GMT', 'content-type': 'application/x-amz-json-1.1', 'content-
length': '2', 'connection': 'keep-alive', 'x-amzn-requestid': '7aa7c3cb-
494e-b923-8610318a238c'}, 'RetryAttempts': 0}}

Key Points

• The VersionId parameter must be passed as a string
• You cannot delete the latest version of a table using this method
• To delete the latest version, use the delete_table function instead
• The function returns response metadata upon successful deletion

Conclusion

Using boto3's delete_table_version method allows you to remove specific old versions of tables from AWS Glue Data Catalog. Remember that only previous versions can be deleted, not the current active version.