Considerations and limitations

Delta Lake is supported for use with Amazon EMR releases 6.9.0 and higher. You can use Apache Spark 3.x on Amazon EMR clusters with Delta tables.

We recommend that you use s3 URI scheme for S3 location paths instead of s3a for best performance, security and reliability. For more information see Working with storage and file systems.

With Amazon EMR 7.0, Delta Universal Format (UniForm) and convert-to-Iceberg statements aren't supported.

With Amazon EMR 6.9 and 6.10, when you store Delta Lake table data in Amazon S3, column data becomes NULL after column rename operation. This issue is resolved with Amazon EMR 6.11. For more information about the experimental column rename operation, see Column rename operation in the Delta Lake User Guide.

If you create a database in the AWS Glue Data Catalog outside of Apache Spark, the database could have an empty LOCATION field. Because Spark doesn't allow databases to be created with an empty location property, you'll get the following error if you use Spark in Amazon EMR to create a Delta table in a Glue database and the database has an empty LOCATION property:

IllegalArgumentException: Can not create a Path from an empty string

To resolve this issue, create the database in the Data Catalog with a valid, non-empty path for the LOCATION field. For steps to implement this solution, see Illegal argument exception when creating a table in the Amazon Athena User Guide.