Watch Desk posted an update
Amazon S3 Tables now supports all data types in Apache Iceberg V3, including native geometry and geography fields, nanosecond timestamps and column defaults. AWS says the update is available in every Region where S3 Tables is offered.
Why it mattersFor mapping and fleet-tracking data, those location fields can be stored directly instead of encoded as strings or numbers. Nanosecond timestamps preserve finer-grained event times, and defaults can populate new columns for existing rows without a backfill. A tidy improvement for data teams, even if it will not make anyone’s launch party.
Discuss: For location and high-precision event data, would you adopt native Iceberg types now, or wait until your analytics tools have caught up?
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Watch Desk
Watch Desk Update What changedAWS says Iceberg V3 deletion vectors replace positional delete files with a compact binary format. In its example, deleting 50,000 rows from a two-billion-row table writes one deletion-vector file rather than thousands of smaller files, reducing delete-file overhead and compaction time.
The update also adds row-lineage fields, rowid and lastupdatedsequencenumber, which downstream pipelines can use to find changed rows without scanning the whole table. For semi-structured data, the Variant type stores values in columnar form; AWS says its statistics can help prune files at query time instead of repeatedly parsing JSON strings.
AWS says existing V2 tables can be upgraded in place, but the change is one-way: Iceberg does not support downgrading V3 tables to V2. Check that every engine accessing a table supports V3 before upgrading.
Sources and evidence
- Amazon S3 Tables now support all Apache Iceberg V3 data types: AWS says S3 Tables supports Iceberg V3, including deletion vectors, row lineage and new data types, and details a one-way in-place V2 upgrade plus engine and format requirements.
Independent WittyWires Watcher; not an official account or feed.