ClassMethod Data Analytics Communication (AWS Data Analysis Edition) - January 2026 Issue
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I am from the Cloud Business Division, Consulting Department, Ishikawa. Despite being after re:Invent 2025, AWS announced many updates in December. Features leveraging AI to "reduce operational effort and improve analysis quality" were released, including Amazon Redshift ODBC 2.x drivers for macOS, automatic semantic enrichment for OpenSearch Service, and automatic data classification using AI agents in SageMaker Catalog.
Amazon QuickSight
New Features & Updates
API Changes
2025/12/11 - Amazon QuickSight - 1 new 12 updated methods
Added new GetIdentityContext API, dashboard customization options for tables and pivot tables, visual style options (borders and decals), GeocodingPreferences for maps, and KeyPairCredentials for DataSourceCredentials. Snapshot API now supports registered users. Parameter limit increased to 400.
2025/12/29 - Amazon QuickSight - 4 new 4 updated methods
Added support to allow users to upgrade their own roles. Additionally, administrators can set this feature to admin or auto-approval, add new self-upgrade capabilities, and restrict them by administrators.
Amazon Quick Suite
New Features & Updates
2025/12/08 - Amazon Quick Suite integrates Quick Research with Quick Flows for report automation
Amazon Quick Suite now includes Quick Research as a step within Quick Flows. This integration allows teams to generate comprehensive research reports as part of automated multi-step workflows, transforming research projects into reusable workflows that can be shared across the organization.
Amazon Redshift
New Features & Updates
2025/12/19 - Amazon Redshift ODBC 2.x Driver now supports Apple macOS
Amazon Redshift now provides ODBC 2.x drivers that support Apple macOS. With Amazon Redshift ODBC 2.x native driver support, you can access Amazon Redshift features that are only available through Amazon Redshift drivers, such as data sharing write capabilities and Amazon IAM Identity Center integration.
API Changes
2025/12/08 - Redshift Serverless - 1 new methods
Added the GetIdentityCenterAuthToken API to retrieve encrypted authentication tokens for Identity Center-integrated serverless workgroups. This API enables secure programmatic access to Identity Center tokens with proper error handling and parameter validation across all supported SDK languages.
AWS Glue
New Features & Updates
2025/12/19 - Zero-ETL for self-managed Database Sources now available in 7 new regions
AWS Glue's zero-ETL capability for self-managed databases is now available in 7 new regions. This feature enables no-code data replication from Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL databases on-premises or on EC2 to Amazon Redshift without complex configurations.
With Tokyo region support in particular, real-time data integration from on-premises databases in Japan to Redshift has become easier, making data analytics platform construction more accessible.
API Changes
2025/12/01 - AWS Glue - 8 updated methods
Added support for Iceberg materialized views in Glue Data Catalog. Includes updated CreateTable API to support materialized views and new APIs to manage data updates for materialized views. Added support for Iceberg table encryption keys and struct field defaults.
Amazon SageMaker Catalog
New Features & Updates
2025/12/30 - Amazon SageMaker Catalog provides automatic data classification using AI agents
Amazon SageMaker Catalog now offers automated data classification capabilities that automatically suggest business glossary terms when publishing data, reducing manual tagging effort and improving metadata consistency across organizations. This feature uses Amazon Bedrock's language models to analyze table metadata and schema information, recommending relevant terms from your organization's business glossary. Data producers receive AI-generated suggestions for business terms defined in their glossary.
Amazon DataZone
New Features & Updates
2025/12/02 - Amazon DataZone - 2 new 3 updated methods
Amazon DataZone now allows catalog datasets to be exported as Amazon S3 tables and provides automatic business glossary term suggestion capabilities for data assets.
Amazon OpenSearch Service
New Features & Updates
2025/12/05 - Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports automatic semantic enrichment
Amazon OpenSearch Service now offers automatic semantic enrichment, equivalent to the feature released earlier this year for OpenSearch Serverless. While traditional keyword search only returned exact matches, this feature understands context and meaning to return more relevant results.
For example, searching for "eco-friendly transportation options" will return documents about "electric vehicles" or "public transportation" even if they don't contain that exact phrase. No ML model management is required, and both English-only and multilingual versions (including Japanese) are available. Billing is based on OCU (Semantic Search) consumption at data ingestion time.
2025/12/17 - Amazon OpenSearch Service announces new OI2 instances
Amazon OpenSearch Service has announced next-generation storage-optimized "oi2" instances powered by the latest AWS Graviton4 processors. Optimized for log analytics and real-time monitoring tasks with large datasets, these instances provide up to 40% better price performance and up to twice the search throughput compared to previous oi1 instances. They also feature fast local NVMe storage, delivering excellent performance for I/O-intensive workloads.
API Changes
2025/12/02 - Amazon OpenSearch Service - 7 updated methods
With GPU acceleration, you can build large vector databases faster and more efficiently. You can enable this capability on new OpenSearch domains and OpenSearch Serverless collections. This feature uses GPU acceleration to reduce the time needed to index data into vector indices.
2025/12/10 - Amazon OpenSearch Service - 2 updated methods
CreateApplication API now supports an optional kms key arn parameter to allow customers to specify CMK application encryption.
2025/12/18 - Amazon OpenSearch Service - 1 updated methods
Amazon OpenSearch Service added support for warm nodes, enabling a new multi-tiered architecture.
Amazon OpenSearch Serverless
New Features & Updates
API Changes
2025/12/02 - OpenSearch Service Serverless - 2 updated methods
With GPU acceleration, you can build large vector databases faster and more efficiently. You can enable this capability on new OpenSearch domains and OpenSearch Serverless collections. This feature uses GPU acceleration to reduce the time needed to index data into vector indices.
AWS Clean Rooms
New Features & Updates
2025/12/16 - AWS Clean Rooms publishes events for member invitations and table readiness to EventBridge
Three new features have been added to AWS Clean Rooms to enhance operational efficiency.
Integration with Amazon EventBridge allows detection of member participation status and table configuration changes as events, making it easier to automate workflows based on configuration changes.
Invitation status visualization enables collaboration creators to directly monitor the acceptance status of each invited member, streamlining progress management.
Table readiness check functionality automatically verifies whether underlying S3 and Glue settings and permissions are correct before executing queries, preventing failures due to configuration errors.
API Changes
2025/12/01 - AWS Clean Rooms Service - 13 updated methods
AWS Clean Rooms now supports privacy-protected synthetic dataset generation for custom ML training.
2025/12/01 - AWS Clean Rooms ML - 2 updated methods
AWS Clean Rooms ML now supports privacy-protected synthetic dataset generation for custom ML training.
2025/12/18 - AWS Clean Rooms Service - 1 new 6 updated methods
Added support for collaboration change requests requiring approval workflows. Added support for change requests to grant or revoke result recipient capabilities, and to change auto-approve change types within an existing collaboration.
Amazon MSK
New Features & Updates
2025/12/18 - Amazon MSK introduces KRaft support for Express Brokers with Apache Kafka v3.9
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 3.9 for Express Brokers. The introduction of KRaft (Kafka Raft) support brings Apache Kafka's new consensus protocol, eliminating dependency on Apache ZooKeeper for metadata management.
2025/12/18 - Amazon MSK Connect now supports dual-stack (IPv4 and IPv6) connectivity for new connectors
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports dual-stack connectivity (IPv4 and IPv6) for new connectors on Amazon MSK Connect. This feature allows customers to create connectors on MSK Connect using both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols, in addition to the existing IPv4-only option.
API Changes
2025/12/17 - Managed Streaming for Kafka Connect - 3 updated methods
Supports dual-stack network connectivity for connectors via the NetworkType field.
Amazon EMR
New Features & Updates
2025/12/02 - Announcing the Apache Spark upgrade agent for Amazon EMR
AWS has announced the Apache Spark upgrade agent, a new capability that accelerates Apache Spark version upgrades for Amazon EMR on EC2 and EMR Serverless. This agent transforms complex upgrade processes that typically take months into projects of just weeks through automated code analysis and transformation.
API Changes
2025/12/19 - EMR Serverless - 3 updated methods
Added JobLevelCostAllocationConfiguration field to enable cost allocation reporting at the job level for better granularity in understanding EMR Serverless costs.
Amazon S3 Vectors
API Changes
2025/12/02 - Amazon S3 Vectors - 3 new 3 updated methods
Amazon S3 Vectors provides cost-effective, elastic, and durable vector storage for executing queries based on semantic meaning and similarity.
Amazon S3 Tables
API Changes
2025/12/02 - Amazon S3 Tables - 13 new 4 updated methods
Added storage class, replication, and table record expiration features to S3 tables.
Finally
The December updates give the impression that "AI-driven automation and knowledge enhancement," as seen in OpenSearch and SageMaker Catalog, are accelerating further. Notably, AWS Glue's Zero-ETL function now supports the Tokyo region, making real-time integration from self-managed databases in the Tokyo region much easier.
Data infrastructure is shifting from the "building" phase to "smart nurturing" with AI as a partner. AWS's evolution shows no signs of slowing down in 2026. We look forward to your continued support of the "Classmethod Data Analytics Communication" this year!
