The Unofficial Snowflake Monthly Release Notes: February 2024

Monthly Snowflake Unofficial Release Notes #New features #Previews #Clients #Behavior Changes #Demos

Welcome to the amazing Unofficial Release Notes for Snowflake! You’ll find all the latest features, drivers, and more in one convenient place. As an unofficial source, I am excited to share my insights and thoughts. Let’s dive in! You can also find all of Snowflake’s releases here.

This month, we provide coverage up to release 8.8.

I would appreciate your suggestions on continuing to combine these monthly release notes. Feel free to comment below or chat with me on LinkedIn.

Note: There is a NEW Deprecated Features for February 2024 2024_02 Bundle Preview (Disabled by Default). Quite a few things are changing, including moving from unlimited retry logic to 10 times only. Check it out.

The Get Started page for some accounts has been removed from trial accounts.

What’s New in Snowflake

New Features

• Preview: ASOF JOIN, Joining Time-Series Data, join tables with time-series data when corresponding timestamp columns contain values that do not match exactly. The join finds the closest matching value from the right table for each row in the lefttable.
• Preview: Snowpark Container Services are available across all AWS regions (but keep in mind that this does not work on trial accounts)
• Preview: Universal Search in Snowsight, on AWS only, quickly and easily find database objects in your account, data products available in the Snowflake Marketplace, relevant Snowflake Documentation topics, and relevant Snowflake Community Knowledge Base articles using natural language.
• Preview: Hybrid Tables, on AWS only, three regions, new Snowflake table type that provides optimized performance on row-oriented read and write operations in transactional and hybrid workloads. Hybrid table features include the availability of indexes for faster access to data and the enforcement of primary, unique, and foreign key constraints.
• Preview: Aggregation Policies, improve privacy by applying a policy that forces the need to aggregate data into groups that contain enough rows to meet the minimum group size requirement.
• Preview: Projection Policies, prevent queries from using a SELECT statement to project a column.
• Preview: Recover worksheets for dropped users.
• General Availability: New navigation for Snowsight, now organized into Projects, Data, Data Products, Monitoring, Admin, and Account.
• General Availability: Write Snowpark code in Python worksheets, write the Python script, import packages easily, and automate a stored procedure and schedule it.
• General Availability: New tutorials for trial accounts and improved experience with sample code (SQL and Python) to allow trial users to experience Snowflake features faster.
• General Availability: Larger maximum file size, increased to 250 MB for Snowsight and a named internal stage.

Performance Improvements Bundle

• Improved execution time for LIMIT 0 queries, reduces execution time for queries that use a count of 0 with LIMIT, which is often used by applications to return column headings and data types for query results.
• General Availability: larger warehouses (5X-LARGE and 6X-LARGE) in Microsoft Azure regions, excluding Azure Government regions.
• Support for the upper and lower collation specifications was added to some functions.

Extensibility

• General availability: External network access, access network locations external to Snowflake from within procedure and UDF handler code, and available on AWS, Azure and GCP.
• General Availability: Python packages policies, allows control of what packages are allowed or not.

SQL Updates

• Preview: New Geospatial functions: ST_INTERSECTION_AGG and ST_UNION_AGG
• General Availability: H3 Functions for GEOGRAPHY Objects, a hierarchical geospatial index that partitions the world into hexagonal cells in a discrete global grid system. They are SQL functions that enable you to use H3 with geospatial data.
• Behaviour 2024_02 bundle : SQL Functions Add Support for the upper, lower, and trim Collation Specifiers, specify alternative rules for comparing strings, which can be used to compare and sort data according to a particular language or other user-specified rule (you must enable the 2024_02 bundle in your account.

Client, Drivers, Libraries and Connectors Updates

• New features: Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics Raw Data 0.11.1 (improved docs, CONFIGURE_CONNECTION now requires an additional parameter security_integration), Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics Aggregate Data 0.15.0 (improved docs, Date ranges for initial ingestion are split into 6-month intervals), Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics Aggregate Data 0.16.0 (CONNECTOR_STATS, ERRORS, INGEST_NOW),Snowflake Connector for Kafka 2.2.0 (Preserved the old data type that goes into an ARRAY column for schematization, AVRO logical types, prevent potential data duplication, schema evolution add columns idempotent, Ingest SDK MAX_CLIENT_LAG configuration), Snowflake API for Python 0.6.0 (>> and << operators of DAGTask now accept a function, DAGTask now uses the DAG’s warehouse by default, DAGTask accepts a new parameter session_parameters,pydantic 2.x, Python 3.11), Snowpark Library for Python 1.12.1 (split_blocks=True by default, during to_pandas conversion, for optimal memory allocation), Snowpark Library for Scala and Java 1.10.0 (Java 17, Dataframe alias, explode function, invoke table functions, table functions to read function arguments, session constructor Session.getOrCreat, JDBC to version 3.14.4, New wrapper for is_null function, Scala to version 2.12.18), .NET Driver 3.0.0 (enhanced security, SnowflakeDbException, driver no longer supports the SFConfiguration.UseV2JsonParser or SFConfiguration.UseV2ChunkDownloader configuration option, multiple SAML integrations), Go 1.8.0 (multiple SAML integrations, improved arrow timestamps), Ingest Java SDK 2.1.0 (Zstandard as the default compression, can drop channels, JDBC to 3.14.5, ), JDBC 3.15.0 (two new java properties, new enablePatternSearch connection parameter), Node.js 1.10.0 (setting the log level, forceGCPUseDownscopedCredential flag, google-cloud version to 7.7.0), PHP PDO Driver 2.0.2 (updated libraries), Snowflake Connector for Python 3.7.1 (dependencies updates, keyring update 23.1.0 to address a security vulnerability), Snowflake Connector for Spark 2.15.0 (trim_space parameter), Snowpark Library for Python 1.13.0 (optional date_part argument in function last_day, SessionBuilder.app_name, cleanup logic at interpreter shutdown to close all active sessions)
• Bug fixes: Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics Raw Data 0.11.1 (improved reading tables available in BigQuery), Snowflake Connector for Kafka 2.2.0 (schema evolution cases, kafka offset, and build java library), Snowflake API for Python 0.6.0 (DAGOperation.run() raised an exception if the DAG doesn’t have a schedule, deleting a DAG didn’t delete all of its sub-tasks, error when a DAG’s config is set), Snowpark Library for Python 1.12.1 (DataFrame.to_pandas that caused an error when evaluating on a Dataframe with an IntergerType column with null values), Snowpark Library for Scala and Java 1.10.0 (wrong license information), .NET Driver 3.0.0 (easier logging, okta bug, fixed exceptions, fast failing for commands, replaced the Portable.BouncyCastle library with BouncyCastle.Cryptography), Go 1.8.0 (fixed okta, WithFetchResultByIDerror), Ingest Java SDK 2.1.0 (overflow issue), JDBC 3.15.0 (parsing large responses, v 4.2, multi-release jar entries), Node.js 1.10.0 (error query status, otkta error 429), PHP PDO Driver 2.0.2 (segmentation faults, visual studio 2019 errors), Snowflake Connector for Python 3.7.1 (memory leak in decimal data conversion, write_pandas wasn’t truncating the target table), Snowflake Connector for Spark 2.15.0 (issue that caused a “cancelled queries can be restarted in the Spark retries after application closed” message.), Snowpark Library for Python 1.13.0 (DataFrame.to_local_iterator, Session.range returns empty result, truncated table names in error messages)
• Preview: Visual Studio Code extension for Snowpark Python, you can now use python in the extension
• Deprecated clients:

Data Lake Updates

• General Availability: GET_DDL for external tables supports fully-qualified location names
• Preview: Secure Data Sharing for Iceberg tables, directly share an Iceberg table without having to create a secure view

Data Loading/Unloading Updates

• General Availability: Specify an external ID for AWS storage access, configure a trust relationship between Snowflake and AWS for multiple objects.
• Preview: COPY FILES, COPY FILES to copy files from one named stage to another.

Security Updates

• General availability: External API authentication and secrets, give us the ability to securely connect to external API while maintaining Secrets secure.

Data Governance Updates

• Preview: Data Classification: Asynchronous tag assignments for columns of tables in a schema and automate tagging for a single classification event, with automated the tag assignments.

Data Sharing Updates

• General Availability: Data sharing & collaboration for accounts in U.S. government regions, there are some limitations here.

Conclusion

It has been a super busy month with so many preview features and others making them generally available. Snowsight has totally changed with new navigation, but also a super important Snowpark Container Services that allows the use of containers close to your data.

Expect articles from me and other Data Superheros from these latest features. I am thinking of doing a proper use case of Snowpark Container Service as part of one of our articles.

I am Augusto Rosa, VP of Engineering for Infostrux Solutions. Snowflake Data Super Hero and SME. 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.

Sources:

• https://community.snowflake.com/s/announcements
• https://docs.snowflake.com/en/release-notes/

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