Increase security and visibility with new Snowflake updates

In this article series, we’ll be discussing the Sept 5-6, 2023 [1] and Sept. 11-12, 2023 [2], release updates from Snowflake, highlighting how these features tie into key costumer use cases you may be experiencing. We’ll specifically touch on how these Snowflake updates impact the development life cycle, data governance or other relevant areas specific to maintaining a healthy Snowflake environment.

Apply ML models to data with new information schema views for class instances

Customers who want to apply machine learning (ML) models to their data can do so in a highly automated way as Snowflake now provides better model management (control and access) and the ability to initiate new runs and train new models automatically.

A “class” in Snowflake terms is similar to a class in classical object-oriented programming in that you can use it to create an instance with specific methods and functions. Fundamentally, a class is an object type, and an instance is the object.

The two available classes in Snowflake at the time of writing are ANOMALY_DETECTION and FORECASTING, which allow users to utilize built-in ML models in Snowflake using their data directly.

The new views for class instances are:

• CLASS_INSTANCE
• CLASS_INSTANCE_FUNCTIONS
• CLASS_INSTANCE_PROCEDURES

These new views allow users with appropriate role access to easily see and identify instances in the environment as well as their associated functions and procedures. This information can be used to verify the existence of instances when using continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) for data environment promotion or to create dynamic structured query language (SQL) procedures to programmatically execute functions against all desired models in the environment. Ultimately, the usefulness of the information schema is only limited to the creativity of the developer using it.

Utilize third party APIs with external network access functionality

Customers who utilize third-party application programming interfaces (APIs) to process or transform data, can now do so in a highly secure and integrated way without their data having to leave Snowflake.