AWS Big Data Blog

Arun Shanmugam

Author: Arun Shanmugam

Arun is a Senior Analytics Solutions Architect at AWS, with a focus on building modern data architecture. He has been successfully delivering scalable data analytics solutions for customers across diverse industries. Outside of work, Arun is an avid outdoor enthusiast who actively engages in CrossFit, road biking, and cricket.

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 […]