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).

Offline store

The offline store is used for historical data when sub-second retrieval is not needed. It is typically used for data exploration, model training, and batch inference.

When you enable both the online and offline stores for your feature group, both stores sync to avoid discrepancies between training and serving data. Please note that an online store feature group with the InMemory storage type enabled does not currently support a corresponding feature group in the offline store (no online to offline replication). For more information about ML model serving in Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, see Online store.

The offline store contains the following TableFormat options. For information about the offline store contents, see OfflineStoreConfig in the Amazon SageMaker API Reference.

Glue table format

The Glue format (default) is a standard Hive type table format for Amazon Glue. With Amazon Glue, you can discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. It also includes additional productivity and data ops tooling for authoring, running jobs, and implementing business workflows. For more information about Amazon Glue, see What is Amazon Glue?.

Iceberg table format

The Iceberg format (recommended) is an open table format for very large analytic tables. With Iceberg, you can compact the small data files into fewer large files in the partition, resulting in significantly faster queries. This compaction operation is concurrent and does not affect ongoing read and write operations on the feature group. For more information about optimizing Iceberg tables, see the Amazon Athena and Amazon Lake Formation user guides.

Iceberg manages large collections of files as tables and supports modern analytical data lake operations. If you choose the Iceberg option when creating new feature groups, Amazon SageMaker Feature Store creates the Iceberg tables using Parquet file format, and registers the tables with the Amazon Glue Data Catalog. For more information about Iceberg table formats, see Using Apache Iceberg tables.