Monthly Snowflake Unofficial Release Notes Covering of August 2023, this Centralized Notes, covers New features, Previews, Drivers, Behavior Changes
Photo by Tom Coomer on Unsplash
Welcome to the Unofficial Release notes for Snowflake, where I combine all release notes from multiple locations, including features, drivers and other things in a single location. As the title says, these are unofficial release notes, and I will add some commentary with my thoughts. This is the 7th month running this blog series.
August was not surprise, and it continued the high pace of innovation and change at Snowflake Data Cloud.
There is an interesting improvements happening in how Snowflake documents releases, and I wonder if my monthly blog post still hold value. One may difference is that Snowflake truly moved to a weekly release notes although at times still release monthly or quarterly blog posts, finally, I include drivers together in this blog post.
Please give me suggestions if I should continue with these monthly combined release notes. Comment below or find me on Linkedin.
This month, we cover up to release 7.30.
For this month’s demo is about Data Classification and A worthy mention is is Vectorized Python UDTFs. Those will be created a separate articles quickly following this article.
Note: that at there are behavior changes for the ODBC 3.1.0, Node.js 1.8.0 (no support Node.js 12), Behavior Change Set 2023_06 is can be enabled, finally Stronger UTF-8 Validation for External Files is coming soon and force failure on external files.
New features in Snowflake
New Features
- General Availability: Account Usage: New CLASS_INSTANCES View, this new view displays a row for each instance of a class
- General Availability: Blocking Public Access to Azure Internal Stages, new function, SYSTEM$BLOCK_INTERNAL_STAGES_PUBLIC_ACCESS, that allows an account administrator to block all public network traffic from accessing the internal stage of an Azure account
- Preview: Data Pipelines Replication Support, ENABLE_ETL_REPLICATION parameter to TRUE and replicate your pipelines to your DR snowflake account
- Preview: Execute SQL statements specified in a file on a stage, this is a interesting feature that you can executive SQL statement inside your stage, for example, you can create your environments based out of a stage
Web Interface
- General Availability: Sharing: Improved UI Messaging, improvements to language on the dialog in the Snowflake UI that tells us what ROLE can view the latest worksheet or dashboard tile results
- General Availability: Snowsight Worksheet Tabs,
- General Availability: Governance area supports GOVERNANCE_VIEWER and OBJECT_VIEWER database roles, in nice news, you no longer need to be an AccountAdmin role to access Governance area, an account role can access the Governance area of Snowsight if the role has been granted the GOVERNANCE_VIEWER and OBJECT_VIEWER database roles
- General Availability: Provider Studio Onboarding, self-service onboarding to become a provider of listings using Provider Studio
Data Loading
- General Availability: New File Format Option — USE_LOGICAL_TYPE, interpret Parquet logical types during data loading
SQL Updates
- General Availability: New System Stored Procedure for Sending Email Notifications, we no longer need to create our own stored procedure to send emails, so it is a nice addon
- General Availability: SELECT *: Selecting Columns Matching a SQL Pattern and Replacing Column Values, use ILIKE with a wildcard and Replace COLUMN names in your SELECT statement
- General Availability: Transforming a GEOMETRY Object to a Different Spatial Reference System (ST_TRANSFORM)
- Preview: Vectorized Python UDTFs, these type of UDFs allows you to use Pandas to process data in a partition-by-partition basis instead of on a row-by-row basis
- Preview: Python Package Version Range Support, you can now have specific Python packages versions
- General Availability: GET_QUERY_OPERATOR_STATS function
- General Availability: Using the Query Hash to Identify Patterns and Trends in Queries — use the hash of the query text to identify, group, and analyze similar queries in the query history
- New functions: ARRAY_MAX , returns the element with the highest value that is not a SQL NULL, ARRAY_MIN , returns the element with the lowest value that is not a SQL NULL, ARRAY_SORT , Returns an ARRAY that contains the elements of the input ARRAY sorted in ascending or descending order.
- Preview: Organizations & Accounts: Dropping an account URL, you are now able to clean up URLs from merged or renamed organizations
Connectors
- New features in these: SnowSQL 1.2.28 (Wow, it seem we may finally get to use SnowSQL on ARM Macs — tried but did not work on my M2, so working with support team to figure out), Go 1.6.24 (improved performance instead of per row data check, does it once per data load, and ability to specify temp folder for encryption purpose), ODBC 3.1.0, Python 3.1.0, JDBC 3.14.1, Node.js 1.8.0, SQLAlchemy 1.5.0 (Geometry data type), Snowpark Python 1.7.0, Kafka 2.0.1,
- Bug fixes releases: .Net 2.1.1, ODBC 3.1.0, Python 3.1.0, JDBC 3.14.1, SQLAlchemy 1.5.0, Snowpark Python 1.7.0, Kafka 2.0.1,
Data Pipelines
- General Availability:
Data Governance
- Preview: Data Classification — International tag values, added international SEMANTIC_CATEGORY tag values that pertain to Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States
- Preview: Data Classification — Shared tag references, data sharing provider can set a tag on an object and share both the tag and the tagged object with the data sharing consumer
- Preview: Set a masking policy on a virtual column, set a masking policy on a virtual column in an external table
Data Collaboration
- Preview: Recurring Subscription-based Pricing Plans for Paid Listings, you can now to subscriptions pricing plans opening a new revenue stream to paid listings
- General Availability: Non-Recurring Subscription-based Pricing Plans for Paid Listings, one time payments for a subscriptions are generally available, not as nice as the above feature but nice to know the feature made to production
Security
- General Availability: Password policies: Add support for password history and time to wait to change a password, nice add to their password policies to configure these two settings
Developer and Extensibility Updates
- General Availability: Support for Python 3.9 and 3.10 in Snowpark, UDFs, UDTFs and stored procedures
- General Availability: Tabular Return Values from Python Stored Procedures — General Availability
Deep Dive of the Month
For August, I decided to truly separate the demo’s into its own article, so they will quickly follow in a few days. Will update with links here at some point. Those will be Data Classification and Vectorized Python UDTFs.
I hope you enjoyed the Unofficial Release Notes in this monthly series about the Snowflake. See you again in September. Asked for feedback, and please reach out and give me feedback if this series have any value.
I’m Augusto Rosa, VP of Engineering for Infostrux Solutions. Thanks for reading my blog post. You can follow me on LinkedIn. And subscribe to Infostrux Medium Blogs https://medium.com/infostrux-solutions for the most interesting Data Engineering and Snowflake news.
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