Snowflake Releases
Snowflake blog and product updates. New features, breaking changes, security advisories and deprecations - each summarised in plain English and updated continuously.
Tracking 86 Snowflake releases · Updated
- Snowflake Blog blogdatasnowflakeengineer ·
Migrate Apache Spark to Snowflake using CoCo skill
Snowflake introduced the CoCo spark-migration skill to help migrate Apache Spark pipelines to Snowpark Connect. This new capability aims to improve performance and reduce operational costs for users migrating their data workloads. The skill is available for all Snowflake users who manage Spark pipelines.
feature announcement - Snowflake Blog blogdatasnowflakeengineer ·
Snowflake Custom Incrementalization for Dynamic Tables Improves Performance
Thrive Learning, a UK-based enterprise learning platform, improved the cost-performance of its Snowflake Dynamic Tables by implementing custom incrementalization. This new capability allows transformations to process only changed rows rather than full refreshes, significantly reducing compute and auto-clustering costs. The solution, developed by Thrive's data engineering team, also maintains data lineage within their dbt workflows, enabling fresher data for AI use cases.
feature patch - Snowflake Blog blogdatasnowflakeengineer ·
Snowflake Enhances Document Intelligence with New AI Functions
Snowflake is introducing native document intelligence capabilities, treating documents as first-class data to improve how businesses process and extract information. These new features, accessible via Snowflake Cortex AI Functions, allow for more accurate digitization and analysis of documents like invoices, contracts, and reports, benefiting a wide range of enterprise users and processes. The capabilities include parsing documents with structural preservation, extracting specific data fields, and enabling deep analytics across large document collections, all within Snowflake's secure environment.
feature announcement - Snowflake Blog blogdatadatabrickssnowflakeengineergovernment ·
Snowflake Horizon Enhances Iceberg Interoperability Against Databricks Unity Catalog
Snowflake's Horizon Catalog now fully implements the Iceberg REST Catalog protocol, enabling bidirectional read/write access and secure credential vending for external Iceberg tables. This contrasts with Databricks Unity Catalog, which offers only inbound access and relies on less secure, long-lived credentials for outbound operations. This update matters for organizations seeking true data agency and reduced vendor lock-in, particularly impacting data engineers and architects managing multi-cloud or hybrid data platforms.
feature announcement - Snowflake Blog blogdatasnowflakegaengineer ·
Open Semantic Interchange Renamed Apache Ossie (Incubating)
The Open Semantic Interchange (OSI) project, an open specification for semantic layers and ontologies, has been renamed Apache Ossie (Incubating) as it enters the Apache Software Foundation's incubator program. This change aims to prevent confusion with other projects using the OSI acronym and to establish a vendor-neutral governance structure. The specification and its YAML-based format remain unchanged, ensuring compatibility for existing users, and the project seeks broader community involvement to define future roadmaps, including enhancing expressiveness and building more integrations.
announcement - Snowflake Blog blogdataaisnowflakeengineer ·
Snowflake and Accenture Partner to Create Agentic Enterprise
Snowflake and Accenture are collaborating to enable an "agentic enterprise" by integrating governed data with intelligent agents capable of making and executing decisions. This partnership aims to address the challenge of deploying AI agents in fragmented environments by providing essential decision context and industry-specific intelligence. The solution leverages Snowflake's data platform as a foundation and Accenture's Context Graph to translate governed data into governed actions across various business functions and industries.
announcement feature - Snowflake Blog blogdatasnowflakepreviewengineer ·
Snowflake Integrates Postgres for Unified Apps, Analytics, and AI
Snowflake is introducing Snowflake Postgres, a new solution designed to bridge the gap between transactional applications and analytical workloads, eliminating the need for complex ETL pipelines. Announced features include data mirroring for real-time replication and 'Postgres for your data lake' for flexible data synchronization with open formats like Iceberg. These capabilities aim to provide businesses with consistent, up-to-date data for AI and real-time applications, impacting teams managing both OLTP and OLAP systems.
feature announcement - Snowflake Blog blogdatasnowflakeengineer ·
Snowflake AIM: Unified AI Platform for Data Migration and Modernization
Snowflake announced Snowflake AIM, a new AI-powered platform designed to accelerate enterprise data migration and modernization efforts. This unified solution combines existing tools like SnowConvert AI and Snowpark Migration Accelerator to automate assessment, code conversion, and migration for various workloads. AIM supports both full modernization to Snowflake-native architectures and rapid virtualization of legacy systems, such as Teradata, offering a phased approach to reduce risk and speed up time-to-value for organizations undergoing data platform transformations.
feature announcement - Snowflake Blog blogdatasnowflakeengineer ·
Snowflake Dynamic Tables: Faster Refreshes and Enhanced Features
Snowflake has released significant performance improvements for Dynamic Tables, achieving up to 2.8x faster refresh times on Gen2 warehouses. New features like QUALIFY row/rank = 1 and PRIMARY KEY RELY constraints enhance incremental processing and data stability. These updates benefit data engineers and architects managing autonomous data pipelines by reducing latency and compute costs, with some features now generally available and others in public preview.
feature patch - Snowflake Blog blogdataaiengineer ·
AI Shifts Data Engineering: Declarative Pipelines and Agentic Future
Data engineering is shifting towards a declarative approach to handle AI's demands and evolving from manual tasks to strategic execution. This allows for more efficient pipeline development, enabling the integration of AI tools like coding agents, which are adept at modern, software-defined data engineering practices. The future role of data engineers will focus on advanced data modeling and system architecture, ensuring data quality and availability for AI and applications, as detailed in a new guide on building resilient data pipelines.
announcement - Snowflake Blog blogdataaisnowflakeengineer ·
Snowflake Enhances AI Data Engineering with New Pipeline Capabilities
Snowflake has introduced new AI-powered features for data engineering, aiming to make pipeline creation more robust and efficient. These capabilities integrate AI directly into workflows, offering agentic assistance, autonomous pipelines, and improved declarative options for SQL and Python developers. The updates focus on reducing manual effort, accelerating time-to-production, and enhancing governance for all data engineers working within or across lakehouses and Snowflake.
feature announcement - Snowflake Blog blogdatasnowflakepreviewengineer ·
Snowflake Hybrid Tables See Major Performance and Cost Improvements
Snowflake has significantly boosted the performance of Hybrid Tables, offering up to 8x faster point lookups and 10x faster batch writes with 10x lower cost, based on internal benchmarks. These enhancements aim to consolidate transactional and analytical workloads, eliminating the need for separate OLTP databases and reducing complexity for AI applications and workflow state management. The improvements, which will be enabled by default for all Hybrid Tables workloads, also include the elimination of request credit billing, resulting in average cost reductions of 15%.
feature patch announcement - Snowflake Blog blogdataaisnowflakeengineer ·
Snowflake CoCo AI agent gains Snowpark Python deployment skill
Snowflake introduced a new AI-powered skill for its CoCo coding agent, named snowpark-python, designed to streamline the deployment of Python pipelines to Snowflake. This feature aims to reduce the overhead of dependency management, configuration, and tool context-switching for data engineers, enabling them to deploy local Python code to production-scale workflows with a single prompt. The skill is available now within Snowsight, CLI, and IDE extensions, offering authoring, deployment, and observability assistance.
feature announcement - Snowflake Blog blogdatasnowflakeengineer ·
Snowflake Adaptive Compute Enhances Performance
Snowflake's Adaptive Compute now automatically adjusts to changing workload demands, aiming to improve performance and operational efficiency. This enhancement benefits users managing dynamic workloads by providing optimized compute resources. The feature is designed to drive measurable business value through its responsive nature.
feature - Snowflake Blog blogdatagovernancesnowflakegaarchitect ·
Snowflake Metadata Hub Unifies Data Estate
Snowflake introduced the Metadata Hub to unify disparate data estates, enabling cross-platform governance without requiring data migration. This feature aims to streamline data management and compliance efforts for organizations. It is designed for data architects and engineers managing complex data environments.
feature announcement - Snowflake Blog blogdatasnowflakeengineer ·
dbt Fusion available on Snowflake
dbt Fusion is now available for use on Snowflake, offering accelerated build times and supporting dbt Core 1.11.5. This integration enhances workflow by enabling native Task orchestration and GitHub Actions CI/CD. It is available at no additional cost to users.
feature announcement
About Snowflake release tracking on ReleaseBytes
Snowflake's weekly releases, behaviour change bundles and feature announcements are easy to lose track of. ReleaseBytes follows the official Snowflake release channels and summarises each update, flagging behaviour changes and deprecations that need action before they are enforced.
Frequently asked questions
How often are Snowflake release notes updated on ReleaseBytes? ›
Continuously. ReleaseBytes monitors the official Snowflake release channels around the clock and publishes a plain-English summary of each announcement shortly after it lands.
What kinds of Snowflake changes does ReleaseBytes track? ›
New features, enhancements, bug fixes, security advisories, breaking changes, deprecations and end-of-life announcements. Every item is tagged by type so you can filter to just the changes that need action.
How can I get alerts for new Snowflake releases? ›
Set up a free email or Slack alert filtered to Snowflake, subscribe to the weekly digest, or follow the RSS feed. Teams can also install the ReleaseBytes GitHub App or connect via MCP.
Where does the Snowflake release data come from? ›
From the official sources: Snowflake blog and product updates. Every item links back to the original vendor announcement.