AWS Glue Data Catalog adds semantic search and MCP agent support

Full analysis

AWS has launched a preview of business context and semantic search for its Glue Data Catalog, a managed metadata repository that helps teams find and understand data assets. Users can now enrich catalog tables with glossary terms and custom metadata fields, and the new Glue Search API lets analysts and AI agents discover tables by semantic meaning rather than exact technical matches. Crucially, AWS has added MCP (Model Context Protocol) compatibility, meaning any MCP-compatible agent — including Claude Code, Kiro, Cursor, and OpenAI Codex — can connect to the catalog with minimal setup via the aws-data-analytics plugin from the Agent Toolkit for AWS. This grounds agents in authoritative, human-curated data definitions rather than having them infer context, reducing hallucination risk when agents reason over enterprise data.