Support for S3 catalog to work with S3 Tables

[nicor88]

Feature Request / Improvement

Amazon S3 tables have being launched, see this, and looks like that S3 tables have a managed iceberg catalog.

Based on https://github.com/awslabs/s3-tables-catalog it looks like that AWS build an S3 catalog wrapper using java, that can be used by query engines like Spark/Trino.
It will be relevant to write to S3 tables via pyiceberg.

More context

Based on my understanding, once an S3 table is created, iceberg metadata are not initialized.
For a freshly created table, it's possible to retrieve the warehouseLocation -> see get_table.
The warehouseLocation looks like a unique S3 bucket, where you can put S3 objects in it.
After putting the S3 objects of an iceberg commit operation: data+metadata, it's possible to use update_table_metadata_location to point the S3 table to the right location.

Note: I'm not 100% sure on the above - and I need to validate it via some tests.

[kevinjqliu]

Thanks for raising this @nicor88! Would you be interested to contribute this feature?

[kevinjqliu]

The catalog implementation can be found here
https://github.com/awslabs/s3-tables-catalog/blob/adfeece9873f06364a4a093bfedacb5efe4a952b/src/software/amazon/s3tables/iceberg/S3TablesCatalog.java

[nlm4145]

I also would be interested in this feature.

[nicor88]

@kevinjqliu Unfortunately I don't have the capacity at the moment to contribute to this feature.
I would nevertheless be available to look at the PR and test the implementation.

[felixscherz]

I'm also interested, I will have a look at the reference @nicor88 provided and create a PR if I can get something to work:)

[petehanssens]

Super keen to see this happen too!

[nicor88]

It looks like that the warehouse location of those S3 tables doesn't support List operations.
I tried to point my local warehouse (using SQLite) to the warehouse location of an S3 table, just to validate if all could work, and I got this error:

AWS Error UNKNOWN (HTTP status 405) during ListObjectsV2 operation: Unable to parse ExceptionName: MethodNotAllowed Message: The specified method is not allowed against this resource.

The issue seems to come from pyarrow, that does this check:

if not overwrite and self.exists() is True:
    raise FileExistsError(f"Cannot create file, already exists: {self.location}")
output_file = self._filesystem.open_output_stream(self._path, buffer_size=self._buffer_size)

The self.exists(), triggers under the hood a list operation, that it's not supported.....

[felixscherz]

I created an intial PR #1429 where I am currently working on supporting table creation. I ran into the same issue that @nicor88 described and could work around it by setting overwrite=True for now.
However, now I get a different error during the write operation for the table metadata:

AWS Error UNKNOWN (HTTP status 400) during CompleteMultipartUpload operation: Unable to parse ExceptionName: S3TablesUnsupportedHeader Message: S3 Tables does not support the following header: x-amz-api-version value: 2006-03-01

I'm currently going through the pyarrow S3FileSystem implementation to see where this header is being introduced.

EDIT:

I tried using a different FileIO and the issue disappears when using pyiceberg.io.fsspecFileIO explicitly via:

properties = {"py-io-impl": "pyiceberg.io.fsspec.FsspecFileIO"}

seems like this is indeed specific to pyarrow

[jamesbornholt]

@felixscherz thanks for catching this (and thanks to everyone who's interested in building S3 Tables support for PyIceberg!). We're working on an S3-side fix for the x-amz-api-version exception you're seeing; hoping to have that out soon.

[buremba]

@jamesbornholt Great to hear that you folks are keeping an eye on here!
Sorry if this is not the right channel to ask the question but considering S3Tables is a mix of catalog + storage layer, is there any plan to provide Iceberg REST compatibility as part of the S3Tables in addition to current API?

IMO that would help accelerate the adoption a lot, otherwise all the Iceberg implementations will need to integrate with S3Tables separately and I have a feeling that maintenance will be non-trivial.

[soumilshah1995]

+1