The AWS Glue Data Catalog is a fully managed, Hive-compatible metastore that resolves table definitions — including Iceberg tables — for engines across the AWS analytics stack.
The AWS Glue Data Catalog is AWS's managed metastore: a central, Hive-compatible registry of databases, tables, schemas, and partitions over data in S3 and other stores.
It acts as the table catalog for lakehouse setups on AWS — Iceberg tables registered in Glue are resolvable by Athena, EMR/Spark, Redshift Spectrum, and third-party engines, with crawlers able to infer schemas from existing data.
As a zero-operations catalog natively understood across the AWS analytics stack, it is the default choice for AWS-centric platforms; Apache Polaris and Nessie are the usual alternatives when catalog portability or git-style table branching matters.
Capabilities:
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