Amazon Redshift announces support for Lambda UDFs and enables tokenization

Posted on: Oct 26, 2020

Amazon Redshift, a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, now supports Lambda user-defined functions (UDFs) enabling you to use an AWS Lambda function as a UDF in Amazon Redshift. This functionality enables you to write custom extensions for your SQL query to achieve tighter integration with other services or third-party products. For example, you can write Lambda UDFs to enable external tokenization of data by integrating with vendors like Protegrity, or access other services such as Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon SageMaker in your Redshift query.

Using Amazon Redshift Lambda UDFs, you can register an AWS Lambda function as UDF in Amazon Redshift cluster, and invoke the UDF from Redshift SQL queries. You can include more powerful operations in the AWS Lambda function such as accessing storage or network resources, which will allow you to integrate with external services. Lambda UDFs can be written in any of the programming languages supported by AWS Lambda, such as Java, Go, PowerShell, Node.js, C#, Python, Ruby, or a custom runtime. You can use Lambda UDFs in any SQL statement such as SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT, or DELETE, and in any clause of the SQL statements where scalar functions are allowed.

The support for Lambda UDFs in Redshift is included with Redshift release version 1.0.19884 or later. This functionality is available to new and existing customers at no additional cost in Redshift. However, you may incur additional charges from the AWS Lambda service for executing the Lambda functions. See AWS Lambda Pricing for more information. Visit our documentation to get started and learn more about Redshift Lambda UDFs, and tokenization of data using Lambda UDFs. Refer to the AWS Region Table for Amazon Redshift availability.