Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now supports direct querying of Apache Iceberg and Parquet data in your data lake

What happened

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now lets you directly query Apache Iceberg and Parquet data stored in your data lake alongside live operational data—no ETL pipelines required. Powered by DuckDB embedded within Aurora, this capability enables single queries that join transactional and historical data using familiar PostgreSQL syntax.

It provides support for AWS Glue Data Catalog, S3, and S3 Tables, with optimizations like predicate pushdown and caching for efficient performance. You can also use Aurora PostgreSQL to query data from data lakes managed in Iceberg REST Catalog (IRC)-compatible catalogs, giving you access to data across a breadth of analytics systems without moving or duplicating it. Whether you’re powering real-time dashboards, enriching transactions with historical context, or building AI agents (AI that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one question) that reason over both live and archived data, you can now do it all through a single, familiar interface.