Metadata table limitations and restrictions

S3 Metadata is currently available only in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) Regions.

S3 Metadata supports all storage classes, except for the following:

To create a metadata table configuration, you must create or specify an S3 table bucket to store your metadata table in. This table bucket must be in the same AWS Region and AWS account as your general purpose bucket.

S3 Metadata isn't supported for directory buckets or table buckets. You can create metadata table configurations only for general purpose buckets.

S3 Metadata doesn't apply to any objects that already existed in your general purpose bucket before you created your metadata table configuration. In other words, S3 Metadata only captures metadata for change events (such as uploads, updates, and deletes) that happen after you have created your metadata table configuration.

S3 Metadata is designed to continuously append to the metadata table as you make changes to your general purpose bucket. Each update creates a snapshot—a new version of the metadata table. Because of the read-only nature of the metadata table, you can't delete records in the metadata table. You also can't use the snapshot expiration capability of S3 Tables to expire old snapshots of your metadata table.

To help minimize your costs, you can periodically delete your metadata table configuration and your metadata tables, and then recreate them. For more information, see Deleting metadata table configurations and Deleting metadata tables.

When you're creating or updating table bucket or table policies, make sure that you don't restrict Amazon S3 from writing to your table bucket or your metadata table. If Amazon S3 is unable to write to your table bucket or your metadata table, you must create a new metadata table by deleting your metadata table configuration and your metadata table, and then creating a new configuration.

Before you can delete a metadata table, you must first delete the associated metadata table configuration on your general purpose bucket.

You can create a metadata table configuration only for an entire general purpose bucket. You can't apply a metadata table configuration at the prefix level.

You can't pause and resume updates to a metadata table. Instead, you can stop a metadata table from updating by deleting its associated metadata table configuration. To start receiving updates again, you must create a new metadata table configuration, which creates a new metadata table.

Metadata tables don't contain all the same metadata as is available through S3 Inventory or through the Amazon S3 REST API. For example, the following information isn't available in metadata tables:

You can't adjust the partitioning or sorting for metadata tables. As a result, some queries might require table scans and therefore might be less efficient.