We are excited to announce that Amazon EMR on EKS release 6.7.0 and onwards includes the ability to run Apache Spark SQL scripts through the StartJobRun API. Spark SQL is a Spark module for structured data processing. Unlike the Spark DataFrame API, Spark SQL interfaces provide Spark with more information about the structure of both the data and computation being performed. Internally, Spark SQL uses this extra information to perform additional optimizations. With this release, you can run Spark SQL queries and Spark SQL-based ETL pipelines directly through Amazon EMR on EKS’ StartJobRun API.