August 07-08, 2024 — 8.29 Release Notes¶

Session policies: Support added for secondary roles¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce support for specifying secondary roles in a session policy. The ALLOWED_SECONDARY_ROLES property of a session policy enables you to scope the set of secondary roles available to a user for the duration of the session. After you set the session policy on the account or a user in the account, the enforcement of the secondary roles occurs when the Snowflake session begins.

Depending on how you configure the property and whether you set the session policy on your account or a user in the account, you can do the following:

• Allow secondary roles in the session.

• Disallow secondary roles in the session.

• Allow only specific secondary roles.

The user can activate all of the allowed secondary roles or a list of secondary roles that are specified by the session policy with the USE SECONDARY ROLES command.

For more information, see:

• Using session policies

• CREATE SESSION POLICY

• USE SECONDARY ROLES

Python user-defined aggregate functions — General availability¶

With this release, Snowflake is pleased to announce the general availability of support for writing user-defined aggregate functions (UDAFs) with a Python handler.

You can use Snowpark Python APIs to create and call user-defined aggregate functions (UDAFs), which take one or more rows as input and produce a single row of output. A UDAF operates on values across multiple rows to perform mathematical calculations such as sum, average, counting, finding minimum or maximum values, standard deviation, and estimation, as well as some non-mathematical operations.

For more information, see:

• Python user-defined aggregate functions (for SQL- and Python-based instructions)

• Creating User-Defined Aggregate Functions (UDAFs) for DataFrames in Python (for a Snowpark Python-based guide)

Access to Git repositories from Snowflake — General availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the general availability of access to Git repositories from within Snowflake. Once you configure Snowflake to act as a client of your Git repository, you can fetch a full clone of your remote repository to a Snowflake repository stage, which represents a local repository. You can reference these fetched files in procedure and function handler code, execute SQL and Python code in Snowflake, copy file contents into Snowflake worksheets, and more.

For more information, see Using a Git repository in Snowflake.

Apache Iceberg™ tables: Support for government regions — General availability¶

With this release, we are pleased to announce the general availability of support for connecting Snowflake to external storage for Apache Iceberg™ tables in government regions.

For more information, see CREATE EXTERNAL VOLUME.