Search Optimization Service
The search optimization service can significantly improve the performance of point lookup queries
The feature is available only in Enterprise Edition
Additional Information: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/search-optimization-service.html
Geospatial Support
Geography Data Type support in Snowflake in preview mode available to all accounts
Additional Information: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/data-types-geospatial.html
External Functions
External functions are user-defined functions that are stored and executed outside of Snowflake
In AWS, external function integration works using a Lambda
In Azure, Azure Functions is leveraged for integration in Snowflake
Additional Information: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/external-functions.html
Masking policies
Snowflake supports Column Level security using Dynamic Data Masking or using External Tokenization which again leverages External Functions
Additional Information: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/security-column.html
Snowsight
Snowsight replaces SQL worksheets in the new interface that is in public preview mode
Snowsight makes it easy to write SQL Query and view as well visualize the data returned by the Queries
Additional Information: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/ui-snowsight.html
Other Features that have been in private preview from early this year are now available in public preview
Data Marketplace - https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/data-marketplace.html
Data Exchange - https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/data-exchange.html
Snowpark
This is a new Data Engineering service that enables developers to innovate more on Data Modelling, Data Preparation (ETL/ELT) and Data Analytics with multi language support of their choice like Python, Scala or Java.
Data Governance
Dynamic Data Masking was already announced in June 2020, Snowflake now extended the Data Governance features with introduction of Enhanced Object Tagging Capabilities. This feature can be leveraged in Metadata management, Data Classification and also for resource utilization/tracking.
Unstructured Data Support
Snowflake currently supports Structured and Semi-Structured Data, now support for Unstructured data support is introduced and snowflake will start supporting PDF, Audi, View and Image files.
Pattern Matching
This a new feature that will be added to Search Optimization Service, looking forward to more details on this from Snowflake
Query Acceleration Service - Automatic Scaling
This is a new service that is built to reduce query run times against large data sets.
This features leverages Sub Query Parallelization if there are sub queries in the submitted query.
S3 Storage Lens - Dashboard in S3 Console to check for Data Lake Insights and outliers
EKS and ECS Anywhere - Allows you to run ECS and EKS anywhere in On-premise or any other data center.
Aurora Serverless V2 - Allows you to quickly scale to as big as you want in fraction of seconds, along with features of read replicas, Multi AZ
Redshift AQUA - High-speed cache on top of Redshift Managed Storage
S3 Updates:
S3 Outposts that allows you to add storage of 48TB or 96TB and S3 Data Sync can be used to keep the data sync between Outpost and AWS.
S3 Intelligent Tiering is extended to 4 Access Tiers (Standard, Infrequent, Archive and Deep Archive)
S3 now has Strong Consistency which will be of great benefit when you are running analytics directly on top of Data Lake and you always want to read the latest record
S3 Replication will support Bi-Directional Replication, Multi Destination Replication and also provides replication notifications with metrics.
S3 Security Update Features now include Bucket Level Owner Overwrite.
EBS - GP3 Volumes which separates out IOPS and Throughput from Storage and optimizes storage cost.
EKS Anywhere and ECS Anywhere allows you to run AWS Services anywhere like On-premise or any Data Center
Lambda compute cost reduced by 1ms instead of 100ms, also now supports 10GB memory and 6 VCPU's and now supports Container images as a packaging format
AWS CloudShell is a browser-based shell that makes it easy to securely manage, explore, and interact with your AWS resources. CloudShell is pre-authenticated with your console credentials.
Aurora Serverless V2 - Scales as big as you want to in fraction of seconds, Multi AZ, Read replicas. MySQL version this year, PostgreSQL early next year
Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL - will work with Application code that uses SQL Server to directly work on using Aurora and Babelfish will be made open source
Redshift AQUA - AQUA is a high-speed cache on top of Redshift Managed Storage that can scale out and process data in parallel across many AQUA nodes.
Sagemaker - has made significant improvements with the following features
Sagemaker Studio - Integrated tools for Sagemaker
Sagemaker Data Wrangler - Comes with 300 built-in transformations for data preparation
Sagemaker Feature Store - Helps store and share machine learning features
Sagemaker Pipelines - Helps run all the steps involved in preparing data and running models
AWS Proton - Will be used as a service for management and deployment of containers and Serverless processes.
DEVOPS Guru - Makes it easy for Developers to identify operational issues, Uses machine learning to identify the configuration issues
AWS Glue Elastic Views - Works like materialized views using different data stores like Dynamo DB, Elastic Search or Redshift
It can be used for Combine or replicate into a target Data Store
Any changes in source will be propagated to target data store
Quicksight Q - Ask any question in NL and dashboard with results will be displayed
AWS Local Zones - 3 new local zones this year and 11 more next year
AWS Wavelength - Optimized for 5G Mobile Computing