July 2023¶

Snowpipe Streaming — General Availability¶

With this release, Snowflake is pleased to announce the general availability of Snowpipe Streaming, the latest addition to Snowflake ingestion offerings. The Snowpipe Streaming API writes rows of data directly to Snowflake tables without the requirement of staging files. This architecture results in lower load latencies with corresponding lower costs for loading any volume of data, which makes it a powerful tool for handling near real-time data streams.

Snowpipe Streaming is also available for the Snowflake Connector for Kafka, which offers an easy upgrade path to take advantage of the lower latency and lower cost loads.

For more information, see Snowpipe Streaming and Using Snowflake Connector for Kafka with Snowpipe Streaming.

Organization Usage: New QUERY_ACCELERATION_HISTORY View¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the QUERY_ACCELERATION_HISTORY view in the Organization Usage schema of the shared SNOWFLAKE database. This view returns the query acceleration usage for warehouses across the accounts in your organization.

For more information, see QUERY_ACCELERATION_HISTORY View.

SQL Syntax for Enabling the ORGADMIN Role — Preview¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the preview of a new ALTER ACCOUNT … SET IS_ORG_ADMIN syntax that allows an organization administrator to enable the ORGADMIN role within a specific account, without contacting Snowflake Support.

Once the ORGADMIN role is enabled for an account, organization administrators can log in to the account and use the role to perform organization-focused tasks like listing and creating accounts. Enabling the ORGADMIN role in an account also allows queries to access data in the ORGANIZATION_USAGE schema.

For more information, see Enabling the ORGADMIN role in an account.

Schema Detection and Evolution for Kafka Connector With Snowpipe Streaming — Preview¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce that the Kafka connector with Snowpipe Streaming now supports schema detection and evolution. The structure of tables in Snowflake can be defined and evolved automatically to support the structure of new Snowpipe streaming data loaded by the Kafka connector.

To use this feature, you need to enable the behavior changes in bundle 2023_05.

For more information, see Schema detection and evolution for Kafka connector with Snowpipe Streaming.

Deleting an Account (Self-service) — Preview¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the preview of self-service account deletion. An organization administrator can now delete an account without contacting Snowflake Support.

An organization administrator starts the process of deleting an account by dropping it. Once dropped, the account enters a grace period during which the account can be restored (“undropped”). Snowflake automatically deletes the account when the grace period expires.

To support the process for deleting an account, this release also introduces the preview of a new syntax for the SHOW ORGANIZATION ACCOUNTS command. When the HISTORY keyword is appended to the command, the output contains dropped accounts along with additional columns such as scheduled deletion time.

For more information, see Dropping an account.

Organization Usage: New REPLICATION_GROUP_USAGE_HISTORY View¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the REPLICATION_GROUP_USAGE_HISTORY view in the Organization Usage schema. The REPLICATION_GROUP_USAGE_HISTORY view allows an organization administrator to obtain details about the replication usage in an organization.

For more information, see REPLICATION_GROUP_USAGE_HISTORY View.

Snowflake Alerts: Support for Future Grants and Object Tagging¶

With this release, Snowflake alerts now support future grants and object tagging.

• You can use the FUTURE keyword in the GRANT <privileges> … TO ROLE command to define an initial set of privileges that should be granted on new alerts created in a specified database or schema.

• You can use the CREATE ALERT and ALTER ALERT commands to assign tags to Snowflake alerts.

• In the CREATE ALERT command, you can use WITH TAG or TAG to assign a tag to a newly created alert.

• In the ALTER ALERT command, you can use SET TAG or UNSET TAG to assign or remove a tag from an existing alert.

Search Optimization: Support for Substring Search in Semi-Structured Data — Preview¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the preview of Search Optimization support for substring and regular expression search in semi-structured data, including ARRAY, OBJECT, and VARIANT columns. Previously, only equality searches on such columns could be optimized.

Substring queries include predicates that use the following keywords:

• LIKE, ILIKE, LIKE ANY, LIKE ALL, ILIKE ANY

• STARTSWITH, ENDSWITH, CONTAINS

• RLIKE, REGEXP, REXEP_LIKE

• SPLIT_PART

To enable search optimization of substring searches on semi-structured columns, use an ALTER TABLE … ADD SEARCH OPTIMIZATION command like one of those below.

ALTER TABLE mytable ADD SEARCH OPTIMIZATION ON SUBSTRING(semi_structured_column);

ALTER TABLE mytable ADD SEARCH OPTIMIZATION ON SUBSTRING(semi_structured_column:field);

ALTER TABLE mytable ADD SEARCH OPTIMIZATION ON SUBSTRING(semi_structured_column:field.nested_field);

The second and third commands illustrate enabling search optimization for a field within a column. Field names must be separated from the column name with a colon. Nested fields may be specified by including additional field names separated by periods, as shown in the third example.

For more information on this search optimization improvement, including its capabilities and limitations, see Search Optimization - Substring Search in VARIANT Types.

New SQL Functions¶

The following function(s) are now available with this release:

SYSTEM$CLUSTERING_INFORMATION Returns Error Messages¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce that the SYSTEM$CLUSTERING_INFORMATION function now returns recent errors associated with Automatic Clustering. These errors, returned as JSON objects in an array, explain why Automatic Clustering could not recluster data. By default, the 10 most recent errors are returned by the function. To allow users to return more or fewer messages, the SYSTEM$CLUSTERING_INFORMATION function now accepts a number as its second argument. This number specifies how many errors should be returned.

For more information, see SYSTEM$CLUSTERING_INFORMATION.

GROUP BY: New ALL Keyword¶

The GROUP BY clause now supports the ALL keyword, which specifies that all expressions in the SELECT list that do not use aggregate functions should be used for grouping.

For example, the following two statements yield the same result:

SELECT state, city, SUM(retail_price * quantity) AS gross_revenue
  FROM sales
  GROUP BY state, city;

SELECT state, city, SUM(retail_price * quantity) AS gross_revenue
  FROM sales
  GROUP BY ALL;

Access History: Track Masking & Row Access Policy References — General Availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the general availability of the policies_referenced column in the Account Usage ACCESS_HISTORY view. This column allows for the monitoring of queries on a table or view protected by a row access policy and a column protected by a masking policy and the enforced masking and row access policies. The column includes support for intermediate objects and columns that are policy protected. Audits on policy protected objects and columns are easier because auditors have a more unified view of how protected data is referenced without having to do complex joins on multiple Account Usage views. This column was introduced in preview in February 2023.

For details, see Access History and the ACCESS_HISTORY View.

Create Named Stages using Snowsight — General Availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the general availability of creating and editing named stages using Snowsight without writing SQL.

To create or edit named stages, you can enter details into Snowsight including information about authentication or encryption for the stage.

For more information, see Staging files using Snowsight.

Create Named Stages using Snowsight — General Availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the general availability of creating and editing named stages using Snowsight without writing SQL.

To create or edit named stages, you can enter details into Snowsight including information about authentication or encryption for the stage.

For more information, see Staging files using Snowsight.

Snowsight Set as Default Web Interface¶

With this release, behavior changes in bundle 2023_04 are enabled by default. As a result, all customers of Snowflake On Demand have Snowsight set as the default web interface for all users in the account and new users of Snowflake have Snowsight set as their default web interface.

For more information, see About the Snowsight upgrade.