Amazon Redshift announces support for VARBYTE 16MB data type

Amazon Redshift has extended the VARBYTE data type from the current 1,024,000 bytes maximum size (see the VARBYTE What’s New announcement from December 2021) to 16,777,216 bytes max size. VARBYTE is a variable size data type for storing and representing variable-length binary strings. With this announcement, Amazon Redshift will support all existing VARBYTE functionality with 16MB VARBYTE values. VARBYTE data type can now ingest data larger than 1,024,000 bytes from Parquet, CSV and text file formats. The default size for a VARBYTE(n) column (if n is not specified) remains 64,0000 bytes.

VARBYTE 16MB support is now available in all commercial AWS Regions. Refer to the AWS Region Table for Amazon Redshift availability. For more information or to get started with Amazon Redshift VARBYTE data type, see the documentation.