Can I add metadata dynamically in Redshift?

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Is there any feature in Redshift that allows adding dynamically metadata to database objects? I mean something similar to object tagging in Snowflake.

asked a year ago621 views
3 Answers
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Is object tagging feature available in Redshift Serverless?

I try following statements in Redshift query editor v2

CREATE TABLE customer (c_custkey bigint NOT NULL,
                               c_name       character varying(25) NOT NULL encode lzo,
                               c_address    character varying(40) NOT NULL encode lzo,
                               CONSTRAINT customer_pkey PRIMARY KEY(c_custkey));

ALTER TABLE customer TAG WITH (key1='value1', key2='value2');

Second statement fails with ERROR: syntax error at or near "TAG" Position: 22 [ErrorId: 1-63a16760-7fc2d1ee0d11ebf72649ac9a]

Could you send link to documentation of object tagging feature?

answered a year ago
  • Sorry, my mistake. I believe I did mislead you. I will delete my answer

  • You mean that Redshift does not address the dynamic metadata issue for now?

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Does just adding comments address your problem? - for example:

CREATE TABLE customer (c_custkey bigint NOT NULL, c_name character varying(25) NOT NULL encode lzo, c_address character varying(40) NOT NULL encode lzo, CONSTRAINT customer_pkey PRIMARY KEY(c_custkey));

COMMENT ON TABLE customer IS 'key1=value1, key2=value2';

SELECT pg_catalog.obj_description('customer'::regclass, 'pg_class')

You'd have to do some parsing on the text but it does allow you to 'tag' - not sure this would be usable by any 3rd party tooling though - you'd have to access it with custom queries.

AWS
answered a year ago
  • Comments are just for... comments. Let's Imagine case that we want to mark all columns that contains PII data. I need to list all columns by tag PII, what's more I want to mask/obfuscate PII data for specific roles/users which are not allowed.

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You could add comments at the column level too to flag which columns are PII - but as you hint at the comments can't then be used to deliver any kind of change of behaviour in the system.

There is a new preview feature for dynamic data masking - see blog on that here: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/how-dynamic-data-masking-support-in-amazon-redshift-helps-achieve-data-privacy-and-compliance/

That helps with the masking part - but it all needs to be statically defined in advance what policies would apply to which columns - it's not dynamically applying it based on a tag/comment property on the data.

You could construct something manually to discover the comments (or change in comments) then dynamically provision some DDM code to enable the masking - so you could have a solution? It's just not that friendly to manage/administer.....

AWS
answered a year ago

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