AWS adds Variant data type to Amazon S3 Tables for Iceberg V3

Amazon S3 Tables now support the Variant data type defined in the Apache Iceberg Version 3 (V3) specification. The new type lets users write semi‑structured JSON directly to S3 Tables without a predefined schema, while still delivering efficient analytical query performance. Iceberg‑compatible engines shred the JSON into hidden columns and generate Parquet statistics for optimizations such as file pruning. S3 Tables also handle ongoing maintenance, including compaction of files that contain Variant columns.

Variant support is available in multiple AWS Regions, including US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris, Stockholm) and South America (São Paulo). A Japanese developer blog demonstrated the feature on EMR Serverless using Spark 4.0 in the Tokyo region, creating a table with a VARIANT column, inserting JSON payloads, and querying fields via JSONPath with the variant_get function.