Classmethod Data Analytics Newsletter (AWS Data Analytics Edition) - February 2026 Issue
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I'm with the Cloud Business Division, Ishikawa. Here is the AWS data analysis update information for January 2026. This month featured many updates related to the optimization of data analysis workloads, including significant enhancements to Amazon Quick Suite's SPICE engine, queue-based query resource management for Redshift Serverless, and multiple updates to AWS Clean Rooms. Let me introduce these and other updates!
Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio
New Features & Updates
2026/01/20 - SageMaker Unified Studio adds support for cross-Region and IAM role-based subscriptions
Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now supports cross-region subscriptions in IDC (IAM Identity Center) based domains. With cross-region support, you can subscribe to AWS Glue tables and views or Amazon Redshift tables and views that were published in AWS regions different from your project.
2026/01/30 - Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now supports AWS PrivateLink
Amazon SageMaker has announced a new feature that enables connections between Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio without customer data traffic traversing the public internet. When security beyond standard data transfer protocols (HTTPS/TLS2) is required, you can configure your VPC to keep data transfers within the AWS network.
Amazon DataZone
API Changes
2026/01/13 - Amazon DataZone - 15 updated methods
Support for IAM role subscriptions to Glue table listings through the CreateSubscriptionRequest API has been added. Also, an owningIamPrincipalArn filter was added to List APIs, and a subscriptionGrantCreationMode parameter was added to subscription target APIs to control grant creation behavior.
2026/01/16 - Amazon DataZone - 3 updated methods
Support for numerical filtering and complex free-text searching has been added to the Search and SearchListings APIs.
2026/01/23 - Amazon DataZone - 1 new methods
An API has been added to delete data export settings for a domain.
Amazon QuickSight
New Features & Updates
2026/01/20 - Amazon Quick Sight expands dashboard customization in tables and pivot tables
Following the recently released customizable tables and pivot tables, Amazon QuickSight now allows viewers to add/remove fields, change aggregations, and modify formatting directly on dashboards without requiring updates from dashboard authors.
These enhanced capabilities give viewers more flexibility to customize data views for specific analytical needs. For example, sales managers can add sales breakdowns by product category to identify growth opportunities, and finance teams can change aggregations from sum to average to better understand spending patterns by department.
2026/01/20 - Amazon Quick Suite launches expanded size, faster ingestion, and richer data type support for SPICE datasets
Amazon Quick Suite's SPICE engine has received three updates. First, the dataset limit has doubled from 1TB to 2TB. Next, data ingestion speeds have been optimized, reducing time to insight. Additionally, the string length limit has been expanded from 2K to 64K Unicode characters, and timestamp support has been extended from 1400 years to 0001 years. These updates address increasing AI-driven workloads, enabling larger and more complex data analyses while maintaining performance.
API Changes
2026/01/21 - Amazon QuickSight - 13 updated methods
Documentation and models for sheet layout groups have been added (allowing grouping of sheet elements). Documentation for features enabling administrators to have granular control over connectors under actions has been added. API documentation for PDF exports in snapshot export APIs has been updated.
Amazon Redshift
API Changes
2026/01/14 - Amazon Redshift - 20 updated methods
Support for enabling additional compute resources for automatic optimization during Amazon Redshift cluster creation and modification operations has been added.
Amazon Redshift Serverless
New Features & Updates
2026/01/15 - Amazon Redshift Serverless adds queue-based query resource management
Amazon Redshift Serverless has introduced queue-based query resource management. You can create dedicated query queues with customized monitoring rules for different workloads. This feature provides fine-grained control over resource usage, and queues can be configured with metric-based predicates and automatic responses. For example, you can set rules to automatically abort queries that exceed time limits or consume excessive resources.
Previously, Query Monitoring Rules (QMR) affected all queries uniformly within a Redshift Serverless workgroup. The new queue-based approach allows you to create queues with different monitoring rules. These queues can be assigned to specific user roles or query groups, with each queue operating independently and rules affecting only queries within that queue.
API Changes
2026/01/14 - Redshift Serverless - 5 updated methods
Support for enabling additional compute resources for automatic optimization during Amazon Redshift Serverless workgroup creation and update operations has been added.
AWS Glue
New Features & Updates
API Changes
2026/01/09 - AWS Glue - 4 new methods
Task execution APIs for MaterializedViews have been added.
Amazon OpenSearch Serverless
API Changes
2026/01/15 - OpenSearch Service Serverless - 5 new 3 updated methods
Amazon OpenSearch Serverless collection groups allow organizing multiple collections and sharing compute resources across collections with different KMS keys. This shared compute model reduces costs by eliminating the need for separate OpenSearch Compute Units (OCUs) for each KMS key.
Amazon EMR
New Features & Updates
2026/01/09 - Amazon EMR Serverless adds support for job run level cost allocation
Amazon EMR Serverless now supports job run level cost allocation, enabling configuration of detailed billing attribution at the individual job run level to provide better visibility into charges for individual job runs. AWS Cost Explorer and Cost and Usage Reports now allow filtering and cost tracking by specific job run IDs or cost allocation tags associated with job runs.
Previously, EMR Serverless only offered application-level cost allocation tags, but with job run level cost allocation, you can now assign cost allocation tags to each job run, enabling detailed billing attribution at the individual job run level.
API Changes
2026/01/06 - EMR Serverless - 5 updated methods
Support for enabling disk encryption using customer-managed AWS KMS keys has been added to CreateApplication, UpdateApplication, and StartJobRun APIs.
AWS Clean Rooms
New Features & Updates
2026/01/02 - AWS Clean Rooms now supports detailed monitoring for collaboration queries
AWS Clean Rooms has begun providing detailed monitoring for SQL queries in collaborations. This new feature publishes detailed metrics to CloudWatch for operational monitoring of collaborations, including query performance and resource utilization.
By publishing detailed monitoring metrics for SQL queries run in Clean Rooms collaborations to CloudWatch, it helps improve observability for large-scale workloads. Collaboration creators can enable detailed monitoring for collaborations, and analysis runners or configured payers can enable detailed monitoring when configuring collaboration memberships. For example, advertisers can monitor campaign lift analysis queries in CloudWatch to identify performance issues and optimize costs.
2026/01/15 - AWS Clean Rooms now supports parameters in PySpark analysis templates
AWS Clean Rooms has announced parameter support for PySpark analysis templates. This enhances flexibility for organizations and their partners to scale privacy-enhanced data collaboration use cases. With this release, you can create a single PySpark analysis template where Clean Rooms collaborators can provide different values at job submission time without modifying the template code.
With parameters for PySpark analysis templates, code authors can create PySpark templates with parameter support, and when approved for execution, job runners can submit parameter values directly to PySpark jobs. For example, a measurement company running attribution analysis for advertising campaigns can dynamically input time frames or geographic regions to quickly gain insights that drive campaign optimization and media planning.
2026/01/21 - AWS Clean Rooms adds support for join and partition hints in SQL
AWS Clean Rooms has announced support for join and partition hints in SQL queries. This enables optimization of join strategies and data partitioning, improving query performance and reducing costs. With this release, you can apply SQL hints to queries using comment-style syntax in pre-approved analysis templates and ad-hoc SQL queries.
You can use broadcast join hints to optimize joins of large tables and partition hints to improve data distribution and enhance parallel processing performance. For example, a measurement company analyzing households watching a live sporting event can use broadcast join hints with lookup tables to improve query performance and reduce costs.
API Changes
2026/01/02 - AWS Clean Rooms Service - 6 updated methods
Support for publishing detailed metrics to CloudWatch for operational monitoring of collaborations has been added. This includes query performance and resource utilization.
2026/01/05 - AWS Clean Rooms ML - 4 updated methods
AWS Clean Rooms ML now supports advanced Spark configurations to optimize SQL performance when creating an MLInputChannel or audience generation job.
2026/01/15 - AWS Clean Rooms Service - 3 updated methods
Parameter support for PySpark analysis templates has been added.
AWS Lake Formation
API Changes
2026/01/15 - AWS Lake Formation - 1 new 4 updated methods
API changes for the GTCForLocation feature. Includes a new API GetTemporaryDataLocationCredentials and updates to RegisterResource and UpdateResource APIs.
Finally
This month featured three updates to AWS Clean Rooms, showing steady evolution in data collaboration with privacy protection. Additionally, the Quick Suite SPICE dataset limit has doubled to 2TB, strengthening support for large-scale data analysis. Please try out any updates that interest you. I hope this article is helpful to you.