AWS Big Data Blog
Beyond JSON blobs: Implementing the VARIANT data type in Apache Iceberg V3
This post is part 1 of a two-part series. We walk through the basics: creating an Iceberg V3 table with a VARIANT column, inserting semi-structured data, and querying it with variant_get(). In Part 2, we scale to millions of rows and benchmark VARIANT against traditional string storage. We measure the difference in query performance and storage footprint.
Unlock the power of Apache Iceberg v3 deletion vectors on Amazon EMR
As modern data architectures expand, Apache Iceberg has become a widely popular open table format, providing ACID transactions, time travel, and schema evolution. In table format v2, Iceberg introduced merge-on-read, improving delete and update handling through positional delete files. These files improve write performance but can slow down reads when not compacted, since Iceberg must […]

