# SHOW PARTITIONS
Lists all the partitions in an Athena table in unsorted order.
## Synopsis
```
SHOW PARTITIONS table_name
```
+ To show the partitions in a table and list them in a specific order, see the [List partitions for a specific table](querying-glue-catalog-listing-partitions.md) section on the [Query the AWS Glue Data Catalog](querying-glue-catalog.md) page.
+ To view the contents of a partition, see the [Query the data](partitions.md#query-the-data) section on the [Partition your data](partitions.md) page.
+ `SHOW PARTITIONS` does not list partitions that are projected by Athena but not registered in the AWS Glue catalog. For information about partition projection, see [Use partition projection with Amazon Athena](partition-projection.md).
+ `SHOW PARTITIONS` lists the partitions in metadata, not the partitions in the actual file system. To update the metadata after you delete partitions manually in Amazon S3, run [ALTER TABLE DROP PARTITION](alter-table-drop-partition.md).
## Examples
The following example query shows the partitions for the `flight_delays_csv` table, which shows flight table data from the US Department of Transportation. For more information about the example `flight_delays_csv` table, see [Lazy Simple SerDe for CSV, TSV, and custom-delimited files](lazy-simple-serde.md). The table is partitioned by year.
```
SHOW PARTITIONS flight_delays_csv
```
**Results**
```
year=2007
year=2015
year=1999
year=1993
year=1991
year=2003
year=1996
year=2014
year=2004
year=2011
...
```
The following example query shows the partitions for the `impressions` table, which contains sample web browsing data. For more information about the example `impressions` table, see [Partition your data](partitions.md). The table is partitioned by the `dt` (datetime) column.
```
SHOW PARTITIONS impressions
```
**Results**
```
dt=2009-04-12-16-00
dt=2009-04-13-18-15
dt=2009-04-14-00-20
dt=2009-04-12-13-00
dt=2009-04-13-02-15
dt=2009-04-14-12-05
dt=2009-04-14-06-15
dt=2009-04-12-21-15
dt=2009-04-13-22-15
...
```
### Listing partitions in sorted order
To order the partitions in the results list, use the following `SELECT` syntax instead of `SHOW PARTITIONS`.
```
SELECT * FROM database_name."table_name$partitions" ORDER BY column_name
```
The following query shows the list of partitions for the `flight_delays_csv` example, but in sorted order.
```
SELECT * FROM "flight_delays_csv$partitions" ORDER BY year
```
**Results**
```
year
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
...
```
For more information, see the [List partitions for a specific table](querying-glue-catalog-listing-partitions.md) section on the [Query the AWS Glue Data Catalog](querying-glue-catalog.md) page.