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.
It was unsurprising to witness the high pace of innovation and changes at Snowflake Data Cloud in November. This month, we provide coverage up to release 7.42.
Python adoption in the Snowflake ecosystem remains high, with multiple changes and connectors released this month. The Snowflake Connector for Python alone had three releases.
I would appreciate your suggestions on whether I should continue to combine these monthly release notes. Feel free to comment below or connect with me on LinkedIn.
Note: that at there are behavior changes Disabled by default on Bundle 2023_08 on November 15th to 16th . See more [_here](https://docs.snowflake.com/en/release-notes/bcr-bundles/2023_08_bundle)._
New features in Snowflake
New Features
- Preview: Native Apps: Support for reference and privilege validation in the manifest file
- General Availability: Schema detection for JSON and CSV
- General Availability: Table schema evolution
- Preview: Iceberg tables, finally out of private preview
- General Availability: Self-service: Enabling the ORGADMIN role, ALTER ACCOUNT … SET IS_ORG_ADMIN without contacting support
- General Availability: Self-service: Deleting an account
Web Interface
- General Availability: Snowsight is the default interface for Snowflake accounts in US government regions
- Preview: Replication and Client Redirect in Snowsight, we now have a page in Snowsight to configure these
- General Availability: More control over notification contacts in Snowsight
- General Availability: Changes to formatting of query results in worksheets and dashboards (part of bundle 2023_07 enabled by default)
Data Collaboration
- General Availability: Recurring subscription-based pricing plans for paid listings
- Preview: Cross-Cloud Auto-Fulfillment support for sharing a Snowflake Native App, you can now share your application with other supported regions
SQL Updates
- General Availability: Search Optimization: Support for Substring Search in Semi-Structured Data, Searching in semi-structured data can involve ARRAY, OBJECT, and VARIANT columns
- General Availability: Improved execution times for some SHOW commands, this performance improvement are most significant for queries that return large result sets
- General Availability: Email Notification Integrations with ALLOWED_RECIPIENTS No Longer Required
- General Availability: UDFs and Stored Procedures: Support for Optional Arguments
- General Availability: Snowflake alerts: Manual execution of alerts, nice one for testing those alerts or even sending the alert as part of pipeline
- General Availability: New function, TRY_DECRYPT, returns a NULL value if error occurs during encrytion
- General Availability: New function, TRY_DECRYPT_RAW, returns a NULL value if error occurs during decrytion
- Preview: Structured types, ARRAY, OBJECT, or MAP that contains elements or key-value pairs
Client, Drivers, Libraries and Connectors
- New features: Connector for Kafka 2.1.1 (JMX metrics, enabled OAuth, schematization columns with special or reserved keywords), SnowSQL 1.2.30 (python dependency update, removed oscrypto dependency), Node.js 1.9.1 (v 20 support, updated libraries, asynchronous queries), Go 1.7.0 (Behavior change, log level, caching performance), .Net 2.1.3 (arrow format, retry logic), Snowpark Library for Python 1.10.0 (sql_error_code and raw_message attributes to SnowflakeSQLException), Python 3.4.0 (socket_timeout, other little things), Python 3.4.1 (urlib3 to version 1.26.18, requests to version 2.31.0), Python 3.5.0 (much smaller install built solely on the apache arrow-nanoarrow project, ), PHP PDO Driver 2.1.0 (security patches, login_timeout, retryTimeout, and max_login_retries connection parameters), ODBC 3.1.3 (library updates, SQLGetStmtAttr(SQL_SF_STMT_ATTR_LAST_QUERY_ID) to return the query id for failed query), JDBC 3.14.3 (manage retries, libraries patches, enablePutGet connection property)
- Bug fixes: Connector for Kafka 2.1.1 (enable.streaming.client.optimization true by default), Snowpark ML (increased column capacity), Node.js 1.9.1 (caching https, retries logic, okta bug, sso bug), Go 1.7.0 (HTAP caching), .Net 2.1.3 (HTAP bugs, deadlocks, improved error language for GCP), Snowflake Connector for ServiceNow 4.19.0 (Behavior and bugs), Snowpark Library for Python 1.10.0 (pandas bug fixes), Python 3.4.0 (login_timeout and network_timeout behavior), SQLAlchemy 1.5.1 (outer lateral joins, external browser authentication bug), ODBC 3.1.3 (small fixes), JDBC 3.14.3 (handling NULL to DATE data type conversions, small other fixes)
- Deprecated: End of Support by January 31st, 2024
Security Updates
- Preview: Replication of network rules, they now get replicated as part of the database replication
- General Availability: Key pair authentication: Improved troubleshooting
- General Availability: Row access policies: Reference a protected mapping table in a row access policy
Data Pipeline
- Preview: Dynamic tables: Support for GRANT ON ALL/FUTURE DYNAMIC TABLE
- Preview: Dynamic tables: Support for GRANT ALL/ALL PRIVILEGES ON DYNAMIC TABLE
Deep Dive of the Month
For November, I will check out Iceberg tables. Watch for this article coming soon.
Conclusion
Biggest item to come out this month is clearly to me Iceberg tables, but there were many other little improvements like in Organization, Python connector had huge improvements made, it is now a much more efficient connector and moved to apache arrow. Even some performance improvements, with search and SHOW command.
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.
Top comments (0)