Access Iceberg tables managed in AWS Glue Iceberg REST catalog and S3 Tables

Written on: January 05, 2026
Last modified on: January 06, 2026

Memo to access Iceberg tables managed in AWS Glue Iceberg REST catalog and S3 Tables.

I used DuckDB 1.4.3.

Setup

Install and load extensions

INSTALL aws;
INSTALL httpfs;
INSTALL iceberg;
LOAD iceberg;

Create a secret that is used to access the Iceberg REST catalog and tables

CREATE SECRET (
 TYPE s3,
 PROVIDER credential_chain,
 CHAIN sts,
 ASSUME_ROLE_ARN 'arn:aws:iam::account_id:role/role',
 REGION 'us-east-1'
);

Connect to the catalog

ATTACH 'account_id' AS glue_catalog (
 TYPE iceberg,
 ENDPOINT 'glue.REGION.amazonaws.com/iceberg',
 AUTHORIZATION_TYPE 'sigv4'
);
-- for federated catalogs of s3 table buckets
ATTACH 'account_id:s3tablescatalog/table_bucket_name' AS glue_catalog (
 TYPE iceberg,
 ENDPOINT_TYPE 'glue'
);

Note: To create tables in Glue Iceberg REST catalog, you need to specify ENDPOINT_TYPE instead of ENDPOINT or disable support_stage_create explicitly. support_stage_create is not supported in Glue Iceberg REST catalog and it is enabled by default when ENDPOINT is specified.

Check

Confirm that the catalog is attached

D show databases;
| database_name |
|---------------|
| glue_catalog  |
| memory        |

The document suggests to use show all tables to see attached tables, but it didn’t return attached tables.

Query

To access attached Iceberg tables, you need to specify a table by catalog.namespace.table format.

select count(*) from glue_catalog.tpch.nation;

create schema (database in REST catalog) and table

create schema glue_catalog.test_db;
create table glue_catalog.test_db.test_tbl as select n from generate_series(1, 100) s(n);

D select count(*) from glue_catalog.test_db.test_tbl;
+--------------+
| count_star() |
+--------------+
| 100          |
+--------------+

Links

→ Top