In February, Snowflake launched new features around streaming data ingestion and data governance and improved SQL experience and performance, with enhancements to Search Optimization Service and more. Read on to learn about everything new announced in February.

Data Governance 

Track Masking & Row Access Policy References in Access History, Now in Public Preview

For queries on a table or view protected by a row access policy and columns protected by a masking policy, Snowflake can now track the enforced masking and row access policies in the Account Usage ACCESS_HISTORY view. Policy references are tracked in the new column, POLICIES_REFERENCED. This new feature makes audits on policy-protected objects and columns easier as it provides a more unified view of how protected data is referenced without needing to do complex joins on multiple Account Usage views. Learn more here

Alerting & Error Notification 

Snowflake Alerts, Now in Public Preview

In this release, Snowflake Alerts notifies customers when data in Snowflake meets certain conditions. Alerts are schema-level objects that allow customers to specify a condition that triggers the alert, the action to perform when the condition is met, and when and how often the condition should be evaluated.

Error Notifications for Snowpipe and Tasks, Now in GA

Get notified of Snowpipe and Task errors with push notifications to your cloud messaging service on AWS, GCP, or Azure. Learn more

SQL Experience & Performance Enhancements

Query Acceleration Service, Now in GA 

Query Acceleration Service gives customers the flexibility and elasticity to handle unpredictable workloads at their discretion. It runs alongside the customer’s existing warehouse to help accelerate the scan and aggregation portions of queries, in near real time. Upon completion of eligible query operations or fragments, the additional resources are then relinquished so customers only pay for what they use. Learn more here.

Search Optimization Service: Support for Tables with Masking Policies and Row Access Policies, Now in GA 

Search Optimization Service is a feature that can significantly improve the performance of point lookup and certain analytical queries.

Snowflake now supports Search Optimization Service for tables that have masking and row access policies applied for all accounts that are Enterprise Edition or higher. This can help improve performance of queries on such tables.

Banker’s Rounding, Now in GA 

As part of improving SQL syntax and functions, Snowflake has introduced a new parameter, rounding_mode, to the ROUND() function, along with a new rounding mode: rounding half to even, also known as banker’s rounding.

Banker’s rounding is less biased toward or away from zero with minimal expected error of the sum of rounded values, making it extremely useful for those dealing with financial or statistical data. It’s also useful when migrating from a source system that is running the same rounding mode as Snowflake—sharing the same rounding mode helps make the migration journey smoother. Learn more here.

Updated SQL Worksheets Released in Snowsight, Now GA 

Snowsight, the interface for interacting with many of the latest and greatest Snowflake features you love, continues to see functionality improvements. This month you’ll notice:

  • Improved find and replace functionality
  • Redesigned autocomplete for commands, columns, and objects
  • Updated function autocomplete, including suggestions for function arguments to make it easier to write user-defined functions
  • Added highlighting for selected keywords so that when you select a term in the SQL editor, all other instances of the term are highlighted

Looking to get started with Snowflake? Check out Felipe Hoffa’s video on how to use Snowsight to get from data to decision faster. 

Streaming Data Ingestion

Snowpipe Streaming, Now in Public Preview 

Ingest rowsets from business application and IoT devices or from Apache Kafka topics directly into Snowflake at low latency. Read the announcement blog for more details and get started guides.

Snowflake Marketplace 

Snowflake customers can tap into Snowflake Marketplace for access to more than 1,800 live data sets, packages of data sets, or data services (applications are currently in private preview) from over 390 third-party data providers and data service providers (as of Jan 31, 2023), as well as market their own products across the Snowflake Data Cloud. Visit Snowflake Marketplace.

Commerce

Placer.ai

Placer.ai provides retailers with actionable insights into—and location analytics on—their audience and competition. With unprecedented visibility into humanity-in-action insights, every retailer can be brilliant at running their business.

Energy

SynMax

SynMax is a tech startup focused on using commercial satellite imagery at scale to provide detailed insights into global energy. It currently tracks every rig and frac crew in North America with satellites in near real time and monitors the world’s oceans for large-scale dark vessel movements that give unprecedented insight into maritime intelligence.

Climatiq

Climatiq is providing the building blocks to achieve carbon intelligence, at scale. Its smart data processing layer, paired with an open data set of global emission data, enables you to measure your emissions in real time and realize meaningful reductions.

Financial

Simcorp

SimCorp provides integrated, best-in-class, multi-asset investment management solutions for the world’s leading asset managers, fund managers, asset servicers, pension and insurance funds, wealth managers, central banks, sovereign wealth funds, and treasury.

Sustainable Platform

Sustainable Platform enables fund managers to invest sustainably while reducing risk. With 30,000 company listings across all markets, Sustainable Platform data allows funds to create sustainable (SDG/ESG/sustainable) investment strategies that are authentic and outperform the market.

Geospatial 

OneWeb

OneWeb is a global communications company delivering broadband satellite internet services to a geographically global demographic.

Olvin

Olvin’s retail data helps you understand the store performance and consumer profiles of over a million retail locations across the U.S. From predictive insights on an individual store’s visits to macro analysis on a national brand’s consumers, you can get the data you need to drive decision-making in your business.

Healthcare & Life Sciences

Definitive Healthcare

Definitive Healthcare’s passion is to transform data, analytics, and expertise into healthcare commercial intelligence. It helps clients uncover the right markets, opportunities, and people so they can shape tomorrow’s healthcare industry. Definitive Healthcare’s SaaS platform creates new paths to commercial success in the healthcare market, enabling companies to identify their next move.

Look Up Tables

Sundeck

Sundeck is a SaaS company based in California that is building a new suite of analytics engineering tools focused specifically on enhancing your use of Snowflake. The company was founded by data warehousing veterans and includes contributors to several open source technologies, including Apache Iceberg, Parquet, and the co-creator of Apache Arrow.

Marketing

BuiltWith Pty Ltd

BuiltWith Technology Tracking provides global technology usage data for over half a billion websites, with history going back to the year 2000. 

BuiltWith technology tracking includes widgets, analytics, frameworks, content management systems, advertisers, content delivery networks, web standards and web servers, to name a few of the technology categories it covers.

Media

No Sam Consulting

No Sam Consulting creates curated, high-quality warehoused data sets available on the Snowflake Marketplace to make data more accessible to any business. 

It also offers cloud consulting services with 20+ years of experience serving small businesses and Fortune 500 companies. The company’s track record shows success in enhancing data management, boosting revenue, and helping companies become more data-driven.

—–

​​Forward-Looking Statements

This post contains express and implied forward-looking statements, including statements regarding (i) Snowflake’s business strategy, (ii) Snowflake’s products, services, and technology offerings, including those that are under development or not generally available, (iii) market growth, trends, and competitive considerations, and (iv) the integration, interoperability, and availability of Snowflake’s products with and on third-party platforms. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, including those described under the heading “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in the Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Annual Reports of Form 10-K that Snowflake files with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In light of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, actual results could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied in the forward-looking statements. As a result, you should not rely on any forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. 

© 2023 Snowflake Inc. All rights reserved. Snowflake, the Snowflake logo, and all other Snowflake product, feature, and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Snowflake Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names or logos mentioned or used herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s). Snowflake may not be associated with, or be sponsored or endorsed by, any such holder(s).