Versioning and rollback

The previous sections described automated and autonomous metadata management for Glue tables. This, however, can lead to unexpected changes in the Data Catalog that might break pipelines relying on it. Even when not relying on automated changes, a human error could also break a table definition by mistake. This section describes the versioning and rollback mechanisms in place in the Data Catalog, designed to avoid and recover from such scenarios.

Table versioning

The Glue Data Catalog has a versioning mechanism for tables. Every time an edit is made to the table (even if the table definition passed as the edit is the same as the already existing one), a new version will be created, identified by a monotonically increasing integer starting at 1.

Only one table version can be active at any time, and only the active version can be accessed—it is not possible to read from a table specifying a previous version, for instance. At any time, the user...