July 25-26, 2023 — 7.25 Release Notes

The following new features and updates (enhancements, fixes, etc.) have been introduced in this release. If you have any questions, please contact Snowflake Support.

Important

Each release may include updates that require the web interface to be refreshed.

As a general practice, to ensure these updates do not impact your usage, we recommend refreshing the web interface after each Snowflake release has been deployed.

New Features

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 Updates

Snowflake Alerts: Support for Future Grants and Object Tagging

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

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 (in equality predicates)

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

Data Governance Updates

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.

Web Interface Updates

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.