Amazon Redshift Spectrum limitations - Amazon Redshift
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Amazon Redshift Spectrum limitations

This topic describes limitations for using Redshift Spectrum.

Note the following considerations when you use Redshift Spectrum:

  • The Amazon Redshift cluster and the Amazon S3 bucket must be in the same Amazon Region.

  • Redshift Spectrum doesn't support enhanced VPC routing with provisioned clusters. To access your Amazon S3 data, you might need to perform additional configuration steps. For more information, see Redshift Spectrum and 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 Redshift Spectrum and 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 Amazon Glue Data Catalog that is enabled for Amazon 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 Amazon Lake Formation, see Redshift Spectrum and Amazon 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 Amazon 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.

  • To use Redshift Spectrum in the China Amazon Region, you must complete the Internet Content Provider (ICP) recordal process for your Amazon account. Without completing this process, you might see access denied errors when you access Amazon S3 through Redshift Spectrum. For more information, see ICP Recordal in Getting Started with Amazon Services in China.