August 28-29, 2023 — 7.30 Release Notes¶

Data Pipelines Replication Support — Preview¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the preview of Data Pipelines replication support, including the replications of stages, storage integrations, pipes, and load history. You can replicate these objects to configure failover for data pipelines across regions and cloud platforms.

Before you can replicate data pipeline objects, you must set at the replication/failover group or account level the enable_etl_replication parameter to TRUE. To replicate any external stages that use a storage integration, you must also configure your replication/failover group to replicate STORAGE INTEGRATIONS.

You can use an ALTER REPLICATION GROUP or ALTER FAILOVER GROUP statement to modify these properties for an existing group.

For more information, see Stage, pipe, and load history replication.

Password policies: Add support for password history and time to wait to change a password¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce support for password history values and the minimum number of days before you can change a password in a password policy:

• The PASSWORD_HISTORY property in a password policy specifies the number of passwords that Snowflake stores. When a user changes their password, the new password cannot match any of the values in the history. If you increase the history value, such as changing the value from 3 to 6, Snowflake stores the three existing values. If you decrease the history value, such as changing from 6 to 3, Snowflake stores the three most recent values and deletes the three oldest values.

• The PASSWORD_MIN_AGE_DAYS property in a password policy specifies the number of days the user must wait before a recently changed password can be changed again. This value helps to ensure that the password history is not exhausted too soon.

These two properties should be set together in a password policy with values that align with your internal security practices. You can specify these property values when you create a password policy or modify an existing password policy.

For details, see CREATE PASSWORD POLICY and ALTER PASSWORD POLICY.

EXECUTE IMMEDIATE FROM File — Preview¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the preview of the EXECUTE IMMEDIATE FROM command. This command executes the SQL statements in a file on a stage. The file must contain syntactically valid SQL statements.

This feature provides a mechanism to control the deployment and management of your Snowflake objects and code. You can use the EXECUTE IMMEDIATE FROM command to execute scripts in any session.

For more information, see EXECUTE IMMEDIATE FROM.

Organizations & Accounts: Dropping an account URL — Preview¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce that organization administrators can use the ALTER ACCOUNT … DROP OLD ORGANIZATION URL command to drop an old account URL that was saved when Snowflake Customer Support performed any of the following actions:

• Renamed the organization.

• Merged two organizations.

• Moved an account from one organization to another.

An old account URL is dropped automatically 90 days after Snowflake Customer Support performs one of these actions, but the organization administrator can now drop it sooner.

Support for Python 3.9 and 3.10 in Snowpark, UDFs, UDTFs and stored procedures — General Availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the general availability of support for Python 3.9 and 3.10 in Snowpark Python, Python UDFs, Python UDTFs and Python stored procedures.

For more information, see:

• Setting Up Your Development Environment for Snowpark Python

• Introduction to Python UDFs

• Writing stored procedures in Python

Tabular Return Values from Python Stored Procedures — General Availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the general availability of tabular stored procedures with a handler written in Python. You can write a procedure that returns data in tabular form. To do this, you specify the procedure’s return type as TABLE (specifying columns for the return value), then have your handler code return the tabular value in a Snowpark dataframe.

For more information, see Returning tabular data.

Set a masking policy on a virtual column — Preview¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce that you can set a masking policy on a virtual column in an external table. This update allows the masking policy on the virtual column to override the masking policy that the virtual column inherits from the VALUE column. This update simplifies external table management because data administrators no longer need to create a view from the semi-structured data in the VALUE column and protect the view, and provides consistent data management and protection of the external table data because the protected virtual column does not expose data unnecessarily.

For details, see Masking policies and external tables.

Governance area supports GOVERNANCE_VIEWER and OBJECT_VIEWER database roles¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce that an account role can access the Governance area of Snowsight if the role has been granted the GOVERNANCE_VIEWER and OBJECT_VIEWER database roles. These database roles exist in the shared SNOWFLAKE database. By granting these database roles to an account role, it is no longer necessary to use the ACCOUNTADMIN role to access the Governance area of Snowsight. This update simplifies the management to access the Governance area of Snowsight.

Provider Studio Onboarding — General Availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the general availability of self-service onboarding to become a provider of listings using Provider Studio.

For more details, see Become a provider.