AWS Big Data Blog

AI-assisted data development with Kiro and SageMaker Unified Studio

With the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code, you can connect Kiro, VS Code, or Cursor directly to Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio. This post demonstrates the integration using Kiro. The same Remote Access connection works with VS Code and Cursor. The post starts by showing what you can do with this integration: using natural language to explore and analyze data in a governed environment. We then walk through the setup so you can try it yourself.

Modernize Amazon Redshift: RA3 to RG Migration best practices

In this post, you learn how to migrate Amazon Redshift RA3 clusters to Graviton-based RG instances. We compare the Elastic Resize, Classic Resize, and Snapshot/Restore migration strategies, with key considerations and best practices to support a smooth migration. We also provide mapping guidance from RA3 to RG to help you right-size your cluster.

Access Amazon S3 data files directly using AWS Lake Formation permissions

In this post, we demonstrate reading from and writing to Lake Formation-managed S3 locations using Apache Spark jobs from EMR. Lake Formation credential vending for S3 location access is available in EMR release label 7.13 and later, Boto3 1.42.29 and later, AWS Java SDK 2.41.32 and later, and AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) version 2.33.1 and later.

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.

Upgrade PySpark from Spark 3.5 to Spark 4.0 with AWS Spark Upgrade Agent

In this post, we walk through a hands-on PySpark migration from Spark 3.5 to Spark 4.0 on Amazon EMR Serverless, using the AWS Spark Upgrade Agent. You’ll see how the agent iteratively validates your application on a live Amazon EMR Serverless application, automatically diagnosing and resolving failures from Amazon CloudWatch logs until the job succeeds.