View a markdown version of this page

Loading multibyte data from Amazon S3 - Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift will no longer support the use of Python UDFs after June 30, 2026. We will start enforcing it in phases. For more information on the details of Python end of life and migration options, see the blog post that was published on June 30, 2025.

Loading multibyte data from Amazon S3

If your data includes non-ASCII multibyte characters (such as Chinese or Cyrillic characters), you must load the data to VARCHAR columns. The VARCHAR data type supports four-byte UTF-8 characters, but the CHAR data type only accepts single-byte ASCII characters. You cannot load five-byte or longer characters into Amazon Redshift tables. For more information about CHAR and VARCHAR, see Data types.

To check which encoding an input file uses, use the Linux file command: 

$ file ordersdata.txt
ordersdata.txt: ASCII English text
$ file uni_ordersdata.dat
uni_ordersdata.dat: UTF-8 Unicode text