March 26-27, 2024 — 8.12 Release Notes (with behavior changes)¶

Organization Usage: Improved views for billing reconciliation — General Availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce that the following views in the Organization Usage schema have been improved to make it easier to reconcile Snowflake usage with monthly billing statements:

• CONTRACT_ITEMS

• RATE_SHEET_DAILY

• REMAINING_BALANCE_DAILY

• USAGE_IN_CURRENCY_DAILY

For details on what changed, see Organization Usage: Updated billing views.

Replication: Stages, pipes, storage integrations, load history, and Snowpipe Streaming — General Availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the general availability of replication for stages, pipes, storage integrations, load history, and Snowpipe Streaming channels. You can replicate these objects to configure failover for data pipelines across regions and cloud platforms.

As part of pipe object replication, pipes in a secondary database are in a READ_ONLY execution state and receive notifications, but do not load data until you promote the secondary database to serve as the primary. After you promote a secondary database, the pipes will transition to a FAILING_OVER execution state.

With Snowpipe Streaming replication, the table object, table data, and the channel offsets associated with the table from the primary database are replicated to the secondary database.

For more information, see Stage, pipe, and load history replication and Replication and Snowpipe Streaming.

Schema detection and evolution for Kafka connector with Snowpipe Streaming — General Availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the general availability of schema detection and evolution for Kafka connector with Snowpipe Streaming. The structure of tables in Snowflake can be defined and evolved automatically to support the structure of Kafka topic message data loaded by the Kafka connector using Snowpipe Streaming.

For more information, see Schema detection and evolution for Kafka connector with Snowpipe Streaming.

Memoizable functions with constant arguments¶

With this release, Snowflake is pleased to announce support for creating a memoizable function with constant arguments. This support provides more flexibility in terms of how to define the function. Additionally, if you reference the function in a data access policy, such as a row access policy, you have more freedom in terms of how to define your policy. The function arguments can be any of the following data types:

• string

• numeric

• date

• Boolean

For details, see:

• Memoizable UDFs.

• Masking policy with a memoizable function.

Share data protected by a role-based policy — General Availability¶

With this release, Snowflake is pleased to announce the general availability to enable a data sharing provider to use the IS_DATABASE_ROLE_IN_SESSION function in the conditions of a masking policy or a row access policy to allow a data sharing consumer to access shared data that is protected by either of these policies. The function argument takes either the name of a database role or a column that contains database roles. This provides more options to the provider to share data, allows the consumer to access sensitive data that the provider makes available, and removes restrictions on policy-protected data when the consumer queries a shared table protected by a policy.

For details, see Share data protected by a policy and

IS_DATABASE_ROLE_IN_SESSION.

Access History: Stored procedure ancestor queries — General Availability¶

With this release, Snowflake is pleased to announce the general availability to track the chain of queries that call a stored procedure by using the parent_query_id and root_query_id columns. These columns allow you to see the query ID that performs a read or write operation on another object, and the query ID for the query that calls a stored procedure, respectively. The columns support calling a stored procedure directly and nested stored procedure calls, such as when one stored procedure calls another stored procedure.

This update was announced in preview during the 8.2 release. For details, see Example: Ancestor queries with stored procedures.

Shared tag references — General Availability¶

With this release, Snowflake is pleased to announce the general availability to allow users in the data sharing consumer account to view shared tags and the tag references on shared objects when the tags and shared objects are in the same database. This update helps the consumer to understand the data sensitivity of a shared object, such as a table containing PII data when the PII tag is set on a table and its columns.

This update was announced in preview during the 7.33 release. For details, see Shared tag references.

Access History: Track objects modified by a DDL operation — General Availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the general availability of tracking objects modified by DDL operations in the Account Usage ACCESS_HISTORY view. These operations include:

• Track how tag and policy assignments change.

• Track the table and column lifecycle.