Metadata table limitations and restrictions

S3 Metadata is currently available only in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) Regions.

S3 Metadata supports all storage classes supported by general purpose buckets. For the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class, the specific tier isn't shown in the metadata table.

When you create a metadata table configuration, your metadata tables are stored in an AWS managed table bucket. You can't store your configuration in a customer-managed table bucket.

S3 Metadata isn't supported for directory buckets, table buckets, or vector buckets. You can create metadata table configurations only for general purpose buckets.The journal table captures metadata only for change events (such as uploads, updates, and deletes) that happen after you have created your metadata table configuration.

You can't control the expiration of journal table or inventory table snapshots. For each table, Amazon S3 stores a minimum of 1 snapshot for a maximum of 24 hours.

To help minimize your costs, you can configure journal table record expiration. By default, journal table records don't expire, and journal table records must be retained for a minimum of 7 days. For more information, see Expiring journal table records.

You can create a metadata table configuration only for an entire general purpose bucket. You can't apply a metadata table configuration at the prefix level.

You can't pause and resume updates to metadata tables. However, you can delete your associated metadata configuration for journal or live inventory tables. Deleting your configuration doesn't delete the associated journal or inventory table. To re-create your configuration, you must first delete the old journal or inventory table, and then Amazon S3 can create a new journal or inventory table. When you re-enable the inventory table, Amazon S3 creates a new inventory table, and you're charged again for backfilling the new inventory table.

Metadata tables don't contain all the same metadata as is available through S3 Inventory or through the Amazon S3 REST API. For example, the following information isn't available in metadata tables:

When you're using Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift to query your metadata tables, you must surround your metadata table namespace names in quotation marks (") or backticks (`), otherwise the query might not work. For examples, see Example metadata table queries.

When using Apache Spark on Amazon EMR or other third-party engines to query your metadata tables, we recommend that you use the Amazon S3 Tables Iceberg REST endpoint. Your query might not run successfully if you don't use this endpoint. For more information, see Accessing tables using the Amazon S3 Tables Iceberg REST endpoint.