Monthly Snowflake Unofficial Release Notes #New features #Previews #Clients #Behavior Changes #Demos
Welcome to the amazing Unofficial Release Notes for Snowflake! Here, you’ll find all the latest features, drivers, and more in one convenient place. As an unofficial source, I’m excited to share my personal insights and thoughts with you. Let’s dive in! You can also find all of Snowflake releases here.
This month, we provide coverage up to release 7.43, although Snowflake seems this month to be creating release notes without a version; very odd, but we will see where this is going. If I had a guess, it was probably a miss in the person creating release notes. Well, be warned that we are probably in version 7.46 or something.
Python adoption in the Snowflake ecosystem remains high, with multiple changes and connectors released this month. Snowflake ML is also super high with three releases.
I would appreciate your suggestions on continuing to combine these monthly release notes. Feel free to comment below or connect with me on LinkedIn.
Note: I can see a pre-created Deprecated Features for January 2024. Will post more in the next month.
New features in Snowflake
New Features
- Preview: Snowpark Container Services, gain access to a fully managed container offering designed to facilitate the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications within the Snowflake ecosystem
- General Availability: Finalizer Task, this task closes anything pending in the DAG and it is guaranteed to run even on failures
- General Availability: Organization Usage: Improved views for billing reconciliation, new views: CONTRACT_ITEMS, RATE_SHEET_DAILY, REMAINING_BALANCE_DAILY, and USAGE_IN_CURRENCY_DAILY
- General Availability: Organization Usage: Improved views for billing reconciliation, easier to manage billing in multiple accounts with new views: CONTRACT_ITEMS, RATE_SHEET_DAILY, REMAINING_BALANCE_DAILY, and USAGE_IN_CURRENCY_DAILY
- Preview: Snowsight Cost Management: Account Overview Page, improves visibility into incurred costs and provides information that can be a starting off point for reporting and optimizing your spend
Web Interface
- General Availability: Load Files onto Stages and Managed Staged Files using Snowsight, this gives us the ability to load and look at files inside external and internal stages
- Preview: Recover worksheets for dropped users, recover up to 500 worksheets for each dropped user
- General Availability: View Query History in worksheets
Extensibility
- Preview: Python Snowpark Local Testing Framework, this gives us the ability to run tests locally or CI/CD to confirm our pandas are working a designed without Snowflake availability
SQL Updates
- General Availability: SYSTEM$CLIENT_VERSION_INFO, returns clients and drivers versions
- General Availability: ARRAYS_TO_OBJECT, Returns an object that contains the keys specified by one input array and the values specified by another input array
Client, Drivers, Libraries and Connectors
- New features: .NET Driver 2.14 (docs on how to use Arrow), .NET Driver 2.15 ( ), Go Snowflake Driver 1.7.1 (upgraded libraries, retry logic), Node.js 1.9.2 (Enhanced observability, updated libraries), Snowflake Connector for Kafka 2.1.2 (snowpipe improvements), Snowflake Connector for Python 3.6.0 (vector types, private_key support, new expired flag, urlib3 version pin), Snowflake API for Python 0.4.0 (initial public preview), Snowflake API for Python 0.5.0 (removed experimental tags), Snowpark Library for Python 1.11.1 (Snowpark library introduces some new features, Local Testing Mode, conn_error attribute to SnowflakeSQLException,vector type, arrays_to_object new function), Snowpark ML 1.1.2 (precision_score metric in SQL), Snowpark ML 1.1.1 (Snowpark ML Modeling API as Generally Available, New passthrough_col parameter), Snowpark ML 1.1.0 (GridSearchCV and RandomizedSearchCV execution is now distributed on multi-node warehouses), SnowSQL 1.2.31 (new — include_connector_version, Stopped removing whitespace from SnowSQL variables)
- Bug fixes: .NET Driver 2.14 (validate accounts), .NET Driver 2.15 (fix certificate revocation checks), Go Snowflake Driver 1.7.1 (better retry), JDBC Driver 3.14.4 (security issue in temp directory), ODBC Driver 3.1.4 (fixed crashes, external browser auth fix), Snowflake Connector for Kafka 2.1.2 (enable.streaming.client.optimization is now TRUE by default, channel naming issue), Snowflake Connector for Python 3.6.0 (date insertion failed), Snowflake API for Python 0.4.0 (Python 3.11, other fixes), Snowflake API for Python 0.5.0 (exception when listing databases and schemas), Snowpark Library for Python 1.11.1 (DataFrame column names quoting supports newline characters, DataFrame generated improved saved), Snowpark ML 1.1.2 (hidden stack trace), Snowpark ML 1.1.1 (Model development fixes), Snowpark ML 1.1.0 (Model development fixes)
Deep Dive of the Month
For December, I will check out container services, watch for that articles. I want to apologize as December is a bit of an exception; I promised a demo article and did not release it. I still plan to do it but simply burned out a little this last two months being too busy with hiring and a million of other things.
Why is container services a big deal? Snowflake continues on a journey to become a full platform around data, and 2023 was a great year that continues to prove it will be a serious competitor. This release provides full Kubernetes Managed services right on top of your data, so no more copying data to get full access to computing logic. There are many use cases for this, such as special machine learning use cases and products with libraries that cannot run inside Snowpark.
One interesting release this month is the “Python Snowpark Local Testing Framework,” which allows developers to have a proper local testing framework. I am looking forward to testing this one out.
Conclusion
Thanks for sticking with me until now, if you continue to read these series, I truly appreciate it. I know Snowflake may be there better place for these, but so far I feel I am still adding value so I will continue. Maybe one day I will stop these monthly series. Feedback always welcome, please reach out on linkedin or comment below.
I’m Augusto Rosa, VP of Engineering for Infostrux Solutions. Thanks for reading my blog post. You can follow me on LinkedIn. Subscribe to Infostrux Medium Blogs https://medium.com/infostrux-solutions for the most interesting Data Engineering and Snowflake news.
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