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Redshift Keeps System Tables Beyond 7 Days with S3 Tables, Now in More Regions!

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

Hello, it's Shii-chan! Today's news is a Region expansion that's great for Redshift operations.

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

AWS What's New announced that Amazon Redshift long-term retention for system table data, through native integration with Amazon S3 Tables, is now available in additional AWS Regions.

The story so far

System table data had a 7-day retention limit. If you use system tables to monitor query performance, audit data warehouse activity, or meet compliance requirements, 7 days can fall short.

What changes

You can configure retention beyond 7 days to meet compliance, auditing, and observability requirements.

  • System table data is replicated automatically
  • No custom extract, transform, load (ETL) pipelines needed
  • No resource contention with your production workloads
  • Data from multiple warehouses can be consolidated in one place for cross-warehouse analysis

Dive Deep

Once enabled, AWS automatically writes system table data to S3 Tables in Apache Iceberg format and manages partitioning, compaction, and retention.

Because it's the open Iceberg format, you can query it through:

  • Redshift
  • Amazon Athena
  • DuckDB
  • Any other Iceberg-compatible engine

You can also build observability dashboards with AWS services or third-party tools without additional operations overhead. The AWS Agent Toolkit provides skills for querying system table data to surface performance insights and optimization recommendations.

It's available for Amazon Redshift Provisioned RG and RA3 instances and Amazon Redshift Serverless. See the original post for the list of Regions.

Wrap-up

  • Keep system tables beyond 7 days in S3 Tables
  • Stored in Apache Iceberg format, with partitioning and compaction handled for you
  • No ETL pipelines or production contention
  • Query with Athena, DuckDB, or other Iceberg-compatible engines

This one is for operators who want longer windows for Redshift auditing, compliance, and performance monitoring!

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