November 03-06, 2023 — 7.39 Release Notes (with Snowday 2023)¶

Account Usage: New AGGREGATE_QUERY_HISTORY View — Preview¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the AGGREGATE_QUERY_HISTORY view in the Account Usage schema of the shared SNOWFLAKE database. This view returns data on executed statements in aggregated intervals.

For more information, see AGGREGATE_QUERY_HISTORY view.

Budgets on Azure, GCP, and VPS — Preview¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the preview of Budgets for accounts in Microsoft Azure (Azure) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) regions, and VPS Edition accounts.

Budgets enable account-level monitoring and notification of Snowflake credit usage for a group of specific Snowflake objects. You can define a monthly spending limit on the compute costs for supported objects in your account. In addition to your account budget, you can create custom budgets to monitor credit usage for a custom group of objects. Budgets sends you a notification when your credit usage is on track to exceed your monthly limit.

For more information, see Monitor credit usage with budgets.

Snowflake Native SDK for Connectors — Preview¶

With this release, Snowflake is pleased to announce preview support for the Snowflake Native SDK for Connectors. The Snowflake Native SDK for Connectors is a set of application templates and quickstarts that show how to build a Snowflake Native App that ingests data from an external data source into Snowflake.

For more information, see Snowflake Native SDK for Connectors.

Access control: Database roles — General availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the general availability of database roles. Database roles are entities within a database to which privileges on securable objects in the same database can be granted and revoked. Database roles are similar to account-level roles except for their scope. Privileges on any object in an account can be granted to account roles, but only privileges on objects within the same database can be granted to a database role.

Snowflake provides built-in database roles in the shared SNOWFLAKE database, such as OBJECT_VIEWER and GOVERNANCE_VIEWER. You can use these database roles to enable a least-privileged access approach to the shared SNOWFLAKE database. For example, when you grant these database roles to an account-level role, you do not need to grant IMPORTED PRIVILEGES on the SNOWFLAKE database to the same account-level role, which provides access to everything in the SNOWFLAKE database. Additionally, you do not need to use the ACCOUNTADMIN role in a production environment to query views in the shared SNOWFLAKE database.

Since entering preview in December 2022, we added support for database roles in the following areas:

• Replication.

• Cloning, using the CREATE DATABASE ROLE … CLONE syntax.

• Future grants in the local database. Future grants are not supported for shared database roles.

The IS_DATABASE_ROLE_IN_SESSION function and its usage with sharing policy-protected data continues to be in preview.

New function SYSTEM$TASK_RUNTIME_INFO¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce a new system function SYSTEM$TASK_RUNTIME_INFO. This system function returns information about the current task run, which makes it easy for you to customize your task executions.

For more information, see SYSTEM$TASK_RUNTIME_INFO.

External network access — Preview on Azure¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce that preview support of access to external network locations from procedure and UDF handler code is available to accounts on Azure (except the Gov region).

With an external access integration, you can:

• Write UDF and procedure handlers that access external locations.

• Allow or block access to locations on a network external to Snowflake.

• Use secrets that represent stored credentials, rather than using literal values, within handler code to authenticate with external network locations.

• Specify which secrets are allowed for use with external network locations.

For more information about using network rules with network policies, see Overview of external network access.

Vectorized Python UDTFs — General Availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the general availability of Vectorized Python UDTFs (user-defined table functions).

Vectorized Python UDTFs enable seamless partition-by-partition processing by operating on partitions as pandas DataFrames and returning results as pandas DataFrames or lists of pandas Series or arrays. Vectorized Python UDTFs allow for easy integration with libraries that operate on pandas DataFrames or pandas arrays.

For more information, see Vectorized Python UDTFs.

Set a masking policy on a virtual column — General Availability¶

With this release, Snowflake is pleased to announce the general availability of setting 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. This update was announced in preview in August 2023 (7.30).

For more information, see Masking policies and external tables.