February 26-28, 2024 — 8.8 Release Notes¶

Secure Data Sharing for Iceberg tables¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce Secure Data Sharing support for Iceberg tables using shares. Before this release, only secure views on Iceberg tables could be shared. You can now directly share an Iceberg table without having to create a secure view.

For more information, see:

• Secure Data Sharing

• Iceberg tables

Query an Iceberg table without granting the USAGE privilege on related objects¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce that a role can now query an Iceberg table without being granted or inheriting the USAGE privilege on the external volume or catalog integration associated with the table.

For more information, see Iceberg tables.

External network access — General Availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the general availability of external network access, with which you can access network locations external to Snowflake from within procedure and UDF handler code. This GA release is available on Google Cloud. External network access was already generally available for accounts using AWS and Azure (except in the Gov region).

When setting up external network access, you create a network rule that represents the external network location. If your handler code will need to authenticate with the external location, you create a secret containing the credentials needed. In handler code, you can use APIs to retrieve credential values from the secret.

For more information, see External network access overview.