Build with geospatial and variant types in Iceberg v3 on AWS Glue 6.0

This article demonstrates how AWS Glue 6.0 with Apache Iceberg v3 enables building data lakes with native geospatial types, nanosecond timestamps, and variant data types for heterogeneous payloads.

• GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY types support native spatial predicates like ST_Intersects for geofence detection without latitude/longitude workarounds
• TIMESTAMP_NTZ(9) preserves nanosecond precision for sub-microsecond event sequencing and ordering
• VARIANT type stores semi-structured data with different schemas in a single column using typed extraction via variant_get
• DEFAULT column values automatically populate omitted fields across multiple ingestion writers
• Example fleet monitoring pipeline detects geofence violations, sequences events at nanosecond precision, and extracts metrics from heterogeneous vehicle sensor payloads
• Iceberg v3 features are portable to any compatible engine supporting these capabilities

These capabilities eliminate schema flattening and external libraries for IoT fleets, multi-tenant systems, and event-driven architectures requiring spatial operations or sub-microsecond precision.