Amazon Redshift Spectrum limitations - Amazon Redshift
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Amazon Redshift Spectrum limitations

This topic describes limitations for using Redshift Spectrum.

Note the following considerations when you use Redshift Spectrum:

  • For RA3 and DC2 provisioned clusters using Redshift Spectrum, the cluster and the Amazon S3 bucket must be in the same AWS Region. Provisioned RG clusters and Amazon Redshift Serverless include an integrated data lake query engine that runs on the cluster's own compute resources and supports querying Amazon S3 data across AWS Regions.

  • When enhanced VPC routing is turned on, Redshift Spectrum queries against data lake tables in Amazon S3 require VPC endpoints for Amazon S3 and AWS Glue so the cluster can reach your data and catalog. Note that Spectrum scans your Amazon S3 data on an AWS-managed fleet outside your VPC, so this data-scan traffic doesn't pass through your VPC even with enhanced VPC routing turned on. For configuration steps, see Querying data lake tables with enhanced VPC routing in the Amazon Redshift Management Guide.

  • Redshift Spectrum supports Amazon S3 access point aliases. For more information, see Using a bucket–style alias for your access point in the Amazon Simple Storage Service User Guide. However, Redshift Spectrum doesn't support VPC with Amazon S3 access point aliases. For more information, see Querying data lake tables with enhanced VPC routing in the Amazon Redshift Management Guide.

  • You can't perform update or delete operations on external tables. To create a new external table in the specified schema, you can use CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE. For more information about CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE, see CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE. To insert the results of a SELECT query into existing external tables on external catalogs, you can use INSERT (external table). For more information about INSERT (external table), see INSERT (external table).

  • Unless you are using an AWS Glue Data Catalog that is enabled for AWS Lake Formation, you can't control user permissions on an external table. Instead, you can grant and revoke permissions on the external schema. For more information about working with AWS Lake Formation, see Redshift Spectrum and AWS Lake Formation.

  • To run Redshift Spectrum queries, the database user must have permission to create temporary tables in the database. The following example grants temporary permission on the database spectrumdb to the spectrumusers user group. 

    grant temp on database spectrumdb to group spectrumusers;

    For more information, see GRANT.

  • When using the Athena Data Catalog or AWS Glue Data Catalog as a metadata store, see Quotas and Limits in the Amazon Redshift Management Guide.

  • Redshift Spectrum doesn't support Amazon EMR with Kerberos.