Posted On: Jun 19, 2023

AWS Lake Formation now supports accessing Glue Data Catalog databases and tables across Regions. Previously, in order to access the Glue Data Catalog databases and tables from a different Region, you had to replicate the catalog items and/or underlying data from the source Region to the local Region. Now, with the cross-Region support in Lake Formation, you can access the Glue catalog databases and tables from any Region that Lake Formation is available. Each feature of Lake Formation, such as LF-Tags based access control, fine grained access permissions at the row and column level, data filters, and sharing to direct IAM principals across accounts are available with cross-Region table access. Lastly, you can also run queries that join tables between local Region tables and cross-Region tables.

This feature enables users to access cross-Region Glue Catalog databases and tables using resource links. Users can run queries across Regions with those resource links using Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR and Glue ETL, without copying source data or the metadata in Glue Data Catalog. Users of Apache Hive Mestatore can also query the federated tables across Regions using this feature. Read this doc for more details. 

This feature is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Lake Formation is available except the AWS GovCloud and China Regions. To learn more, visit the documentation.