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 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 8.4.
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: There is a NEW Deprecated Features for January 2024 2024_01 Bundle (Disabled by Default). There are quite a few things changing, including moving from unlimited retry logic to 10 times only. Check it out.
What’s New in Snowflake
New Features
- General availability: Snowflake Native App Framework on AWS and Azure, this was super fast. Open the flood gate for a lot of applications, it has been some interesting apps related to industry focus for example
- Preview: Authentication enhancements: Authentication policies, control how users login, this is an excellent addition to the Snowflake Security
- Preview: Authentication enhancements: Identity-first login flow, this improves the login flow by identifying the user first
- Preview: Authentication enhancements: Multiple identity providers support, supports multiple identity providers
- Preview: Authentication enhancements: New properties for SAML2 security integrations, you can now restrict the domain and email addresses allowed
- Preview: Snowflake Native App Framework: Support for Azure, this is simply adding Azure to be supported
- Preview: Access History: Support added for stored procedure ancestor queries, this tracks the chain of queries that call a stored procedure by using the parent_query_id and root_query_id columns
- Preview: Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics Raw Data and Aggregate Data, no more needing an external ELT tool to ingest these data sets
- General Availability: EXECUTE IMMEDIATE FROM File, executes the SQL statements in a file on a stage and it really all about control of deployments and managing Snowflake objects
- General Availability: Network rules, this was super fast to reach GA. Again this features enables these two other features below.
- General Availability: Enhanced network security
- General Availability: Network isolation to internal stages using AWS PrivateLink, isolation of network traffic on AWS
Extensibility
- Preview: External network access, to access particular network locations outside of Snowflake securely, you can utilize that access within the handler code for both user-defined functions (UDFs) and stored procedures
- General Availability: Account Usage: New EXTERNAL_ACCESS_HISTORY View, in the SNOWFLAKE shared database and it provides a view into the access to external network locations from procedures and UDF handlers
- Preview: Java 17 support
Virtual Warehouse Updates
- General Availability: Larger warehouses in Microsoft Azure Regions, 5X and 6X warehouses
Web Interface Updates
- General Availability: Creating a table when loading a file in Snowsight, it uses INFER_SCHEMA table function to automatically create a table.
Client, Drivers, Libraries and Connectors Updates
- New features: .NET Driver 2.2.0 (Behaviour replaces underscores (_) in account names with hyphens (-), performance improvements), Go 1.7.2 (Go 1.21., Arrow 14, library updates, new examples), Ingest Java SDK 2.0.5 (lots of small things including new par MAX_CLIENT_LAG), JDBC Driver 3.14.5 (AIX 7.2, multiple SAML integrations allowed, getQueryStatusV2), Node.js Driver 1.9.3 (multiple SAML integrations allowed, library updates), ODBC Driver 3.2.0 (removed the ODBCInstLib setting, multiple SAML integrations allowed), Snowflake Connector for Python 3.7.0 (Python 3.12, improve C++ code warnings and performance issues, improved messaging and local testing, multiple SAML integrations allowed), Snowpark ML 1.2.0 (fit_predict method in AgglomerativeClustering, DBSCAN, and OPTICS classes, fit_transform method in MDS, SpectralEmbedding and TSNE class), Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics Raw Data 0.10.1 (initial release), Snowflake Connector for Google Analytics Aggregate Data 0.14.0 (initial release), Snowpark Library for Python 1.12.0 (Behavior Changes in the API Compatibility, so much here, external_access_integrations, DataFrame.analytics).
- Bug fixes: .NET Driver 2.2.0, Go 1.7.2 (error handling, no more retries for 400 and 405, fixed example), Ingest Java SDK 2.0.5 (reverted a change and fixed tests to run on all clouds), JDBC Driver 3.14.5 (GCP token expiration, arrow format on AIX bug), Node.js Driver 1.9.3 (SESSION_TOKEN_EXPIRED error), ODBC Driver 3.2.0 (Fixed performance regression on Windows, fixed Okta bug, improved error messages), Snowflake Connector for Python 3.7.0 (PyArrow Table type hinting, and other errors), Snowpark Library for Python 1.12.0 (more 6 bugs fixed).
Data Collaboration Updates
- General Availability: Organization Usage: New LISTING_AUTO_FULFILLMENT_USAGE_HISTORY View, all about the cost of Cross-Cloud Auto-Fulfillment in the organization
Data Loading/Unloading Updates
- General Availability: Snowpipe update: a new pipe status added STOPPED_BY_SNOWFLAKE_ADMIN when Snowflake Support stops your pipe
Data Pipelines Updates
- General Availability: Automatic task graph retry, disabled by default
Deep Dive of the Month
For January, wow so much to check out. I have been doing a poor job in the last two months at releasing specific articles for features, but there are many releasing in Snowflake Medium account. I am working towards getting back to form.
My choice for deep dive is Snowflake Native App Framework and going to try to release an article soon.
Conclusion
January was a super busy month with so many features, but however, I think having the App Framework in General Availability means we can now get support for it using Snowflake Support. There are though many other goodies, for example, Snowflake always been a strong Security posture but it is continues to improve, and added some very good controls for over the login for Enterprises.
This month it rounds up a really strong showing focused on making Snowflake 🤒 “the data cloud” with support not just traditional data warehousing but full blow applications on top. You can run containers on it with access to a full Kubernetes cluster on top of your data, no more data movements. In the world of having to compute large amounts of data, being close to the data is key.
I cannot wait what February is going to bring …
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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