Monthly Snowflake Unofficial Release Notes Covering September 2023, these Centralized Notes cover New features, Previews, Drivers, and Behavior Changes
Welcome to the Unofficial Release Notes for Snowflake, where I combine all release notes from multiple locations, including features, drivers, and other things in a single location. As the title says, these are unofficial release notes, and I will add some commentary with my thoughts.
September was not a surprise, and it continued the high pace of innovation and change at Snowflake Data Cloud.
This month, we cover up to release 7.34. Please give me suggestions if I should continue with these monthly combined release notes. Comment below or find me on Linkedin.
Note: that at there are behavior changes for released in 7.34, Behavior Bundle 2023_07 Bundle and you can see all changes here https://docs.snowflake.com/en/release-notes/bcr-bundles/2023_07_bundle.
New features in Snowflake
New Features
- General Availability: Snowflake Alerts
- General Availability: New Information Schema Views for Class Instances
- General Availability: Streamlit in Snowflake, host your streamline directly in Snowflake
- Preview: External Network Access, this is a cool neat feature that allows UDFs to access external end points, and it opens a million different possibilities
- Preview: Network Rules, this feature enables aggregation of network rules
- Preview: Enhanced Network Security, improved security using Network Rules, we can now restrict based on S3 endpoint or an internal stage on AWS
- Preview: Network Isolation to Internal Stages Using AWS PrivateLink, isolate traffic for an internal stage on AWS
Web Interface
- General Availability: Managing data governance in Snowsight
Data Loading
- General Availability: Cross-platform Support for Snowpipe Auto-Ingest, support for three public clouds, AWS, Azure and GCP
- General Availability: Amazon EventBridge Support for Snowpipe Auto-Ingest
- General Availability:Replicating streams on Snowflake tables populated by Snowpipe Streaming
- General Availability: Snowpipe Streaming authentication updates,
- General Availability: New options for INFER_SCHEMA, new options MAX_FILE_COUNT and MAX_RECORDS_PER_FILE
SQL Updates
- General Availability: New Function: IS_DATABASE_ROLE_IN_SESSION, Verifies whether the database role is in the user’s active primary or secondary role hierarchy for the current session
- General Availability: ARRAY_FLATTEN, this new function flattens an ARRAY of ARRAYs into a single ARRAY.
Connectors
- New features in these: Python 3.2.0 (renamed parser to manager, new default configs), Snowpark ML 1.0.6 (model development size increased from 8MB), Snowpark Library for Python 1.8.0 (support for session from configuration, DataFrame.save_as_table can include clustering keys), .NET Driver 2.1.2 (support for hybrid tables), Go Snowflake Driver 1.6.25 (support for hybrid tables), Node.js Driver 1.9.0 (support for hybrid tables), ODBC Driver 3.1.1 (Updated cacert), PHP PDO Driver 2.0.0 (PHP 8.2 and M1 Mac Support), Snowflake Connector for Kafka 2.1.0 (Java Metrics, several updates to Snowpipe Streaming)
- Bug fixes release: Snowpark ML 1.0.6 (inference of columns, bug in NumPy), Snowpark Library for Python 1.8.0, .NET Driver 2.1.2, Go Snowflake Driver 1.6.25, JDBC Driver 3.14.2, Node.js Driver 1.9.0 (Node 12 removed, ODBC Driver 3.1.1 (lots of bug fixes), PHP PDO Driver 2.0.0 (update from openssl 1.1.1 to openssl 3.0.9), Snowflake Connector for Kafka 2.1.0,
Data Governance
- Preview: Row access policies: Reference a protected mapping table in a row access policy
- Preview: Share data protected by a role-based policy
- Preview: Shared Tag References, this allows consumer accounts to view the tags on shared objects
- Preview: Reference a protected mapping table in a row access policy
- Preview: Sharing policy-protected data
- General Availability: Tag-based Masking Policy: Support for Database & Schema, this enables protecting of columns based on tags across any table and column inside a database or schema
Replication Updates
- General Availability: New FAILOVER Privilege for Client Redirect, this allows other accounts to do failover instead of just the administrator
Deep Dive of the Month
For September, I will demo Streamlit in Snowflake, however, like last month. I will publish it as a separate article. Look for the Native Data Clean Rooms articles coming out soon.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed the Unofficial Release Notes in this monthly series about the Snowflake. See you again in October. I asked for feedback, and please reach out and give me feedback if this series has any value.
This month continues to grow in features; many of the features are on governance, security, and application. One interesting point is that Snowflake is starting to add hybrid tables support into many of their drivers, so I assume this means it is coming out soon in Public Preview.
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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