Amazon S3 Tables Now Support the Variant Data Type for Apache Iceberg V3
AWS, Tuesday, July 28th, 2026
S3 Tables adds the Iceberg V3 Variant type so semi-structured JSON can be written without predefining a schema.
Amazon S3 Tables now support the Variant data type defined in the Apache Iceberg Version 3 specification. Teams can write semi-structured data such as JSON directly to S3 Tables without declaring a fixed schema in advance, which shortens the path from ingest to queryable data.
Despite the flexible typing, Iceberg's Variant encoding preserves efficient analytical query performance rather than falling back to opaque string storage.
The capability is aimed at event and telemetry pipelines where upstream payload shapes change frequently. It brings S3 Tables in line with the Iceberg V3 specification.