AWS Athena MSCK REPAIR TABLE tablename command - amazon-s3

Question

Is there any number of partitions we would expect this command
MSCK REPAIR TABLE tablename;
to fail on?
I have a system that currently has over 27k partitions and the schema changes for the Athena table we drop the table, recreate the table with say the new column(s) tacked to the end and then run
MSCK REPAIR TABLE tablename;
We had no luck with this command doing any work what so every after we let it run for 5 hours. Not a single partition was added. Wondering if anyone has information about a partition limit we may have hit but can't find documented anywhere.

Answer 1

MSCK REPAIR TABLE is an extremely inefficient command. I really wish the documentation didn't encourage people to use it.
What to do instead depends on a number of things that are unique to your situation.
In the general case I would recommend writing a script that performed S3 listings and constructed a list of partitions with their locations, and used the Glue API BatchCreatePartition to add the partitions to your table.
When your S3 location contains lots of files, like it sounds yours does, I would either use S3 Inventory to avoid listing everything, or list objects with a delimiter of / so that I could list only the directory/partition structure part of the bucket and skip listing all files. 27K partitions can be listed fairly quickly if you avoid listing everything.
Glue's BatchCreatePartitions is a bit annoying to use since you have to specify all columns, the serde, and everything for each partition, but it's faster than running ALTER TABLE … ADD PARTION … and waiting for query execution to finish – and ridiculously faster than MSCK REPAIR TABLE ….
When it comes to adding new partitions to an existing table you should also never use MSCK REPAIR TABLE, for mostly the same reasons. Almost always when you add new partitions to a table you know the location of the new partitions, and ALTER TABLE … ADD PARTION … or Glue's BatchCreatePartitions can be used directly with no scripting necessary.
If the process that adds new data is separate from the process that adds new partitions, I would recommend setting up S3 notifications to an SQS queue and periodically reading the messages, aggregating the locations of new files and constructing the list of new partitions from that.