What new security features are being introduced in the Trust Center?

  • Anomaly Detection: Uses both rule-based (generally available) and AI-based models (public preview soon) to detect anomalous behavior and suspicious access attempts.
  • Leaked Password Protection: (Generally available) Automatically disables user passwords discovered on the dark web.
  • Bad IP Protection: (Generally available soon) Blocks access from known malicious IP addresses.
  • Trust Center Extensions: (Generally available soon) Allow customers to build custom scanners and integrate with security partner solutions.

What is “Copilot for Horizon Catalog”?

Copilot for Horizon Catalog (in private preview soon) is an AI-powered assistant that allows users to use natural language for governance, security, and metadata discovery tasks within the new Snowsight experience, making it easier to get critical information about datasets.

What is Snowflake Horizon Catalog, and how does it support Apache Iceberg?

Snowflake Horizon Catalog provides unified security, governance, and discovery across regions and clouds. It now supports Apache Iceberg through Catalog-linked Databases (generally available soon), which federate across Iceberg REST catalogs and automatically sync Iceberg objects managed by remote catalogs into Horizon Catalog. This allows data engineers to manage their entire Iceberg ecosystem from a single interface.

How is Snowflake improving management across multiple accounts within an organization?

Users with GLOBALORGADMIN roles can now create an organization account (generally available), use SQL to query organization usage views (generally available soon), and set up organization users and user groups (public preview), making it easier and more efficient to manage Snowflake organizations at scale.

How is Snowflake enhancing cost management and FinOps?

Snowflake is introducing several FinOps innovations:

  • Cost-Based Anomaly Detection: (Public preview) Now integrated into the Cost Management interface (which is now generally available for roles other than ACCOUNTADMIN), it alerts users to abnormal cost spikes.
  • Tag-Based Budgets: (Generally available soon) Allows establishing spending limits based on resource tags.
  • Enhanced Performance Visibility: Tools like Performance Explorer (GA soon), Query Insights (private preview), and Cost Insights for Large Query Gaps (private preview) offer better optimization.
  • FinOps Foundation Membership: Snowflake has joined as a Premier Enterprise Member to help drive and adopt industry best practices.

What is “Snowflake Adaptive Compute” and how does it simplify operations?

Snowflake Adaptive Compute (in private preview) is the next evolution of Snowflake's compute service. It automates infrastructure choices by automatically selecting the appropriate cluster size(s), number of clusters, and auto-suspend/resume duration for jobs. It also intelligently routes queries to right-sized clusters without user action, saving time, minimizing configurations, and improving price/performance. Warehouses created using this service are called Adaptive Warehouses.

What is “Standard Warehouse – Generation 2 (Gen2)” and what are its benefits?

Standard Warehouse – Gen2 is an updated version of Snowflake’s current Standard Warehouse. It features upgraded hardware and additional performance enhancements, delivering 2.1x faster performance for core analytics workloads. This is generally available.

What are the key themes of Snowflake’s recent platform announcements?

The announcements focus on making the Snowflake platform even easier to use, more performant, and more trusted. Key themes include intelligent compute innovations, enhanced FinOps capabilities, easier cross-account management, an AI-powered catalog for governance and discovery, comprehensive security enhancements, improved observability, robust business continuity/disaster recovery, greater extensibility, and new ways to leverage transactional data.

What challenges do organizations face with data management, and how does Snowflake address them?

Many organizations struggle with the complexity and cost of managing diverse data, applications, and models. They often use piecemeal solutions from multiple cloud vendors, leading to manual configurations, difficult governance, security challenges, wasteful downtime, and underutilized data. Snowflake provides a fully managed platform that automates administration, scales with needs, integrates AI with data, and offers continuous cost savings through automatic performance improvements and built-in FinOps.

Who has access to Canvas in ChatGPT?

Canvas is available in beta to ChatGPT Plus and Team users globally. Enterprise and Edu users will get access a week later, and it's planned to be available to all ChatGPT Free users once it exits beta.

What is canvas in ChatGPT?

Canvas is a new interface in ChatGPT designed for working on writing and coding projects. It allows users to collaborate with ChatGPT on projects beyond simple chat, providing tools for editing, refining, and managing ideas within a separate window.

Are there legal notices regarding the Snowflake ML functions?

Snowflake’s ML functions are subject to review and oversight, with outputs possibly containing inaccuracies or biases.

What type of algorithm powers Snowflake’s forecasting?

A gradient boosting machine algorithm that models trends, auto-regressive lags, and cyclic calendar variables, handling features without one-hot encoding.

What factors determine the choice of virtual warehouse for forecasting?

Factors include the size and number of rows and columns in your data, with recommendations to use Snowpark-optimized warehouses for larger datasets.

How does Snowflake determine feature importance in forecasts?

The !EXPLAIN_FEATURE_IMPORTANCE method ranks features based on their impact on predictions, showing their importance on a normalized scale.

How can I assess the accuracy of my forecasting model?

Use the model!SHOW_EVALUATION_METRICS method to view metrics like MAE, MAPE, and SMAPE for evaluating model performance.

How do additional features affect forecasting?

Include columns like weather data in the model; these features influence predictions based on trends in those data points.

How can I forecast multiple series in one model?

Combine identifiers like store_id and item into a new column and use it with the SERIES_COLNAME parameter for multi-series forecasts.

Can Snowflake’s forecasting handle missing or misaligned timestamps?

Yes, Snowflake's model training is designed to manage real-world data issues, including missing, duplicate, or misaligned time steps.

What is an example of data setup for forecasting?

Data should include columns like store_id, item identifier, timestamp, and sales values, potentially with additional features like temperature and holiday indicators.