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!
It was unsurprising to witness the high pace of innovation and changes at Snowflake Data Cloud in October. This month, we provide coverage up to release 7.39.
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 for released in October 31 for a list below of Connectors.
New features in Snowflake
New Features
- Preview: Snowflake Native SDK for Connectors, these are application templates and quickstarts demonstrating how to build a Snowflake Native App that imports data from external sources into Snowflake.
- General Availability: Logging and tracing from handler code, this has been a Preview features and now fully out
- Preview: Budgets, thank you Snowflake for helping us finally control costs in Snowflake, it enables account-level monitoring and notifications
- Preview: Dynamic tables refreshed on creation by default
Web Interface
- General Availability: Accessing billing usage statements, you can now use Snowsights to look at billing statements, thank you Snowflake for continuing to give us tools to manage the bills
- Preview: Task graph run debugging, you can review tasks history and debug failures
- Preview: Viewing Query History in worksheets, this is a little update that allows to see the query history and query results inside a worksheet
- Deprecated: Can no longer add or manage payment details using Classic Console
- General Availability: Snowsight is the default interface for Snowflake accounts in US government regions
Data Collaboration
- General Availability: Allow non-admins to set up Cross-Cloud Auto-Fulfillment, it means Account Admin can delegate access to set up auto-fulfillment and share listings with consumers in other regions
- Preview: Offer a limited trial of a data product on the Snowflake Marketplace, nice as marketplace data product companies can now offer trial versions of their products — NOTE: With the release of limited trials of data products, personalized listings will no longer be available for new listings
- General Availability: Company name for listing analytics, adds ability to see which Company is consuming your listing in Provider Studio
SQL Updates
- General Availability: CURRENT_ACCOUNT_NAME, is a new context function which returns the name of the current account within the session context
- General Availability: Fixed an issue with column aliases for aggregates and the GROUP BY ALL clause
- General Availability: ALTER TABLE: Support for IF [NOT] EXISTS with ADD COLUMN and DROP COLUMN
- Preview: H3 functions for GEOGRAPHY objects, support for hierarchical geospatial index that partitions the world into hexagonal cells in a discrete global grid system
Client, Drivers, Libraries and Connectors
- New features: Snowflake Connector for Python 3.2.1 (thread safety in telemetry, improve auth), Snowflake Connector for Python 3.3.0 (nanoarrow introduced), Snowflake Connector for Python 3.3.1 (permissions on non-windows platforms), Snowpark Library for Python 1.9.0 (Python 3.11 runtime, PythonObjJSONEncoder support), SnowSQL 1.2.29 (security update for cryptography package),
- Bug fixes: JDBC Driver 3.14.2 (fixed honor the useS3RegionUrl), JDBC 3.13.34 (small fix to GCP PUT), Snowflake Connector for Python 3.2.1 (fixed ignoreing AWS PrivateLink settings on retries), Snowflake Connector for Python 3.3.1 (certificates, import error), Snowpark Library for Python 1.9.0 (Revert back to using CTAS, fix import for temporary stored procedures), Snowflake Connector for ServiceNow 4.17.1 (small improvements, performance)
- Deprecated: Per the Snowflake Support policy, any client version lower than the following will be out of support as of October 31, 2023:
Deprecated Client List
Extensibility Updates
- Preview: Support for Python 3.11 in Snowpark, UDFs, UDTFs and stored procedures
- Preview: Python packages policies, you can allow or block third-party Pyhon packages from Anaconda at the account level as it helps meet a stronger security and compliance stand
- General Availability: Reading files with a Python/Scala function or procedure, for those that missed, this is a quite a nice feature that allows a lot to be done, may write an demo article about this. Two updates happened for both Python and Scala. See a lab here
- Preview: External network access on Azure, just a release of the feature at the azure cloud. See this article for explanation.
- General Availability: Vectorized Python UDTFs, partition-by-partition processing is performed on pandas DataFrames, with the results returned as pandas DataFrames, arrays, or lists of pandas Series.
Security Updates
- Preview: Network rules support Azure private endpoints
- General Availability: Access control: Database roles, entities to which privileges on securable objects in the same database can be granted and revoked. They have a limited scope and can grant privileges only on objects within the same database.
Data Pipeline
- General Availability: New function SYSTEM$TASK_RUNTIME_INFO, returns information about the current task run
Data Pipeline
- General Availability: Set a masking policy on a virtual column, create a masking policy on a virtual column of an external table. Quite a cool and amazing feature
Deep Dive of the Month
For October, I will check out Snowflake Budgets feature article. Coming around 8 days after this article.
Conclusion
I cannot wait to do the November article as I finish this article, I am watching Snowday 2023, so many announcements. It is exciting. But back to October, it was a loaded month but I do have to mention the native SDK. Snowflake continues to disrupt the data market.
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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