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Snowflake has introduced several data engineering updates, including preview capabilities for DCM Projects. Notably, "VOLATILE scalar UDFs are supported with dynamic table incremental refresh" is now generally available, alongside general availability for cloning dynamic Iceberg tables.

dbt Core v1.12 introduces an opt-in Rust parser that is significantly faster than the Python parser, delivering 5-10x speedups on large projects. This release also adds native private package installation via SSH and supports JavaScript UDFs on Snowflake and BigQuery.

Snowflake has announced the general availability of support for volatile scalar user-defined functions within dynamic table incremental refreshes. This update allows data engineers to build more flexible, real-time pipelines without triggering full table rebuilds.

ClickHouse 26.6 introduces hypothetical skip indexes to test query performance without building them, alongside AI embedding functions. Additionally, Visa's Authorize.net team paired ClickHouse Cloud with LibreChat to enable conversational analytics, reclaiming "8-10 hours per user each week."

Snowflake has released updates for its Data Clean Rooms. To ensure these new updates are applied to the user interface, clean room UI users must log out and log back in. New updates are applied to the UI automatically when a user starts a new session after a new update is deployed.

Snowflake has introduced named key pair management, allowing data engineers to use SQL to register, rotate, modify, and remove named key pairs for users. This feature improves on legacy user properties by supporting an optional role restriction and expiration time for each named key pair.

BigQuery now supports data governance tags in Preview, enabling column-level security and data masking. These Resource Manager tags attach to sensitive columns to enforce data policies.

Snowflake has announced the general availability of consumer-controlled maintenance policies for Snowflake Native Apps. Consumers can now define when app upgrades happen in their accounts.

Snowflake Cortex AI_TRANSCRIBE now supports AAC input, both as standalone audio and as audio tracks in video files. This allows data engineers to transcribe recordings from Apple devices and streaming pipelines directly in Snowflake, without converting formats first.

Snowflake has announced that CREATE OR ALTER is generally available for 24 object types. This feature creates an object if it does not exist, or modifies an existing one to match the definition.

Snowflake has launched its Online Feature Store in public preview to serve the latest feature values with low-latency online retrieval backed by Snowflake Postgres. Designed for real-time ML applications like fraud detection, it supports batch, stream, and real-time feature views.

BigQuery conversational analytics now supports the AI.AGG function in preview. Additionally, as part of Gemini in BigQuery, conversational analytics now supports HIPAA compliance, ensuring stronger security and privacy standards for healthcare data engineering workloads.

Snowflake has launched backup instance types in public preview for Snowpark Container Services. When a compute pool faces an insufficient capacity error, Snowflake automatically retries provisioning using an ordered list of fallback instance families defined by the new BACKUPINSTANCEFAMILIES

Google patched a missing authorization vulnerability in BigQuery, Dataform, and Colab Enterprise that allowed attackers to "perform cross-tenant repository takeover." Additionally, incremental data transfers for the Salesforce Data Transfer Service are now generally available.

BigQuery introduced two Preview features. The Data Transfer Service now supports transferring metadata from PostgreSQL and SQL Server into Knowledge Catalog. Also, the Data Agent Kit extension lets you interact with BigQuery resources directly in your agent environment using IDEs like VS Code.

Snowflake released updates for its Data Clean Rooms. UI users receive automatic updates upon starting a new session, while API users can manage updates manually or automatically. API users can check their environment version by querying SELECT FROM SAMOOHABYSNOWFLAKELOCALDB.ADMIN.VERSION;*

BigQuery has introduced preview support for multi-level aggregation in GoogleSQL, allowing you to use an aggregate function as an argument to another aggregate function. Additionally, an updated version of the Simba ODBC driver for BigQuery is now available to improve connectivity.

Snowflake CoWork's Deep Research mode is now generally available for complex, multi-step data investigations. It decomposes open-ended questions into parallel sub-investigations across structured and unstructured data. Every claim in the report is traced back to its source data and queries.

Snowflake Container Runtime version 2.7 is now available for CPU and GPU. Key updates include ipywidgets support in notebooks and a shift to Ray Train as the default PyTorch backend. The legacy path will be removed in an upcoming release. It also fixes session context overwriting issues.

Snowflake now supports the VARIANT data type on Iceberg tables created from Delta table files in object storage. This allows for querying semi-structured data using dot or bracket notation. Snowflake maps them to the Snowflake VARIANT data type. Delta Direct tables are read-only in Snowflake.

Amazon Redshift patch 203 is rolling out across all supported AWS regions. This deployment follows a staggered schedule that takes several weeks to complete. It takes several weeks for a new version to become available in all Amazon Redshift supported AWS Regions.

Snowflake introduced resource budgets for Cortex Search to manage credit consumption. Data engineers can set monthly spending limits and trigger automated actions like service suspension or access revocation. Resource budgets let you define a monthly spending limit and take automated actions.

Snowflake Cortex AI_TRANSLATE now supports up to 100,000 input tokens, allowing for the translation of large documents and long-form transcripts directly via SQL. This update helps simplify multilingual data pipelines by eliminating the need for manual text splitting or custom preprocessing.

BigQuery has temporarily disabled support for the AdInsightsMMM report within Facebook Ads data transfers. This disruption stems from schema changes in the Facebook Ads API. Existing data transfers from Facebook Ads that include the AdInsightsMMM report will continue to run without that data.

Snowflake has launched domain verification into general availability. Account admins can now prove ownership of an email domain via DNS TXT records. After a domain is verified, every user across every account in the organization whose email address is in that domain is treated as having a verified