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AWS Glue Data Quality Can Now Show You Your Data's Distribution!

AWS What's New ★★★★ View Markdown
#aws#infrastructure#devops

Hey everyone, it's Shiichan! Today I found a data-quality update that data engineers will love.

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS What's New, AWS Glue Data Quality now has a new Distribution Analyzer. It generates frequency distribution profiles for your data: histograms for numeric columns, and value distributions for categorical, date, and boolean columns. You can also customize the number of bins, so you can tune the granularity to your use case.

The story so far

Glue Data Quality already let you run checks through rulesets written in the Data Quality Definition Language (DQDL), but there wasn't a dedicated way to quickly see how your data was actually distributed. If you wanted to spot skewness, outliers, or unexpected patterns, you had to write your own code to aggregate the data first.

What changes

The Distribution Analyzer plugs straight into your existing DQDL rulesets, so you can get distribution profiles alongside your regular data quality checks in the very same evaluation run. No custom code needed to spot skew, outliers, or unexpected patterns anymore. It's a welcome addition for data engineers who want more reliable pipelines.

Dive Deep

The generated distribution statistics are stored in Amazon S3, so you can query them later with services like Amazon Athena. They're also exposed through APIs, making them easy to plug into monitoring workflows or visualization tools. Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio integration is supported too, so you can surface the stats right in your analysis or monitoring dashboards.

It's available in all AWS commercial Regions and AWS GovCloud (US).

Wrap-up

  • AWS Glue Data Quality adds a Distribution Analyzer for histograms (numeric columns) and value distributions (categorical, date, boolean columns)
  • Supports custom bin counts and plugs directly into existing DQDL rulesets
  • Results are stored in Amazon S3 and queryable via Athena, APIs, or SageMaker Unified Studio
  • Available in all AWS commercial Regions and AWS GovCloud (US)

If you want to make your pipeline's quality checks more concrete, this one's worth trying out!

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