May 20-22, 2024 — 8.20 Release Notes¶

Trust Center — Preview¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the preview of the Trust Center. You can use the Trust Center to evaluate and monitor your account for security risks in Snowsight. The Trust Center also provides recommendations on how to remediate security risks found in your account.

For more information, see Trust Center.

CREATE OR ALTER TABLE and CREATE OR ALTER TASK — Preview¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the preview of the CREATE OR ALTER TABLE and CREATE OR ALTER TASK commands. CREATE OR ALTER commands combine the functionality of the CREATE command and the ALTER command. A CREATE OR ALTER statement executes as a CREATE statement if the object doesn’t exist. If it does exist, it transforms the object according to the object definition in the statement.

CREATE OR ALTER TABLE provides a declarative and idempotent approach to defining your tables and tasks. If a table is transformed, data is preserved when possible.

For more information, see CREATE TABLE and CREATE TASK.

Iceberg tables — General availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the general availability of Iceberg tables for Snowflake.

Iceberg tables for Snowflake combine the performance and query semantics of regular Snowflake tables with external cloud storage that you manage. They are ideal for maintaining a single copy of data with interoperability across a variety of compute engines.

For more information, see Iceberg tables.

Replace invalid UTF-8 characters in Iceberg tables¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce support for specifying whether Snowflake should replace invalid UTF-8 characters with the Unicode replacement character (�) in query results for Iceberg tables that use an external catalog.

For more information, see REPLACE_INVALID_CHARACTERS.

Structured type evolution for Iceberg tables¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce structured type evolution for Snowflake-managed Iceberg tables.

For more information, see ALTER ICEBERG TABLE … ALTER COLUMN … SET DATA TYPE.

Set a storage serialization policy¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce support for setting a storage serialization policy for Iceberg tables that use Snowflake as the catalog. The storage serialization policy specifies the type of encoding and compression that Snowflake uses for table data files.

For more information, see STORAGE_SERIALIZATION_POLICY and CREATE ICEBERG TABLE.

Change ALLOW_WRITES to FALSE for external volumes¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce that you can block write operations on an external volume by setting the ALLOW_WRITES parameter to FALSE.

For more information, see ALTER EXTERNAL VOLUME.

New ICEBERG_ACCESS_ERRORS view¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the release of the ICEBERG_ACCESS_ERRORS view in the Snowflake MONITORING schema. The view displays information about external volume access errors for your Snowflake account.

For more information, see ICEBERG_ACCESS_ERRORS view.