Snowflake Standard Edition

•Network Policies, object level access control

•Can store structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.

•Encryption

•ETL for batch and streaming data ingestion.

•Complete SQL Data Warehouse

•Secure Data Sharing across regions / clouds

•Premier Support 24 x 365

•1 day of time travel

•Always-on enterprise grade encryption in transit and at rest

•Customer dedicated virtual warehouses

•MFA and Federated authentication (OAuth)

•Database Replication

•External Functions and stored procedures

•SnowSight, SnowSQL, SnowCD

•Create your own Data Exchange

•Data Marketplace access

•Fail-Safe for 7 days

•Resource Monitors

•Geospatial

•UDF, External Functions, External Tables, Stored Procedures

•Clustering data

•Partner connect

•SnowPipe, Streams, Bulk Loading, Kafka connector,

•Tasks

Snowflake Community and Premier Support (24x7 coverage)

Enterprise Edition

•Standard +

•Materialized Views

•Extended Time Travel Up to 90 days

•Search Optimization Service

•Multi-cluster warehouse 

•Data masking 

•Column and row level security

•Object tagging

•Access History

•Query Acceleration

Business Critical

•Enterprise +

•HIPAA and PCI DSS support

•Support for AWS Private Link

•Customer managed keys

•Encryption everywhere

•Database failover and failback for Business continuity

•AWS API Gateway Private Endpoints support

Virtual Private Snowflake

•Business Critical + **

•Customer dedicated virtual servers

•Customer dedicated metadata store

** a few exceptions apply 

Snowflake Release Process

•New releases every week

•Transparent deployment in the background

•No downtime or disruption

•12-hour early access is available for enterprise edition

•24-hour early access for Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) editions

Weekly Release

•Full release  - new features, enhancements, bug-fixes, behavior changes, release notes

•Patch release – fixes only

Monthly Releases (Behavior Changes)

•What is Behavior Change – change in existing behavior that provides different results than previous feature

•May impact customers workloads

•Naming convention for Behavior Change releases – YYYY_NN, where NN is ordinal number of the release for the year

•Implemented once in a month with 2 month bundle cycle as part of Weekly release except November and December

•Typically, 3rd or 4th weekly release of the month

Behavior Change Bundle Life Cycle

•It comprises of two periods –

•Testing Period (1st  Month) – the bundle is introduced as “Disabled by Default”.

•The bundle can be enabled and tested by the user

•Opt-out Period (2nd Month) – The bundle is enabled by default

•User can choose to disable the bundle

•Snowflake provides documentation for description of each behavior, list of upcoming and recently implemented bundles

Staged Release Process:

•Snowflake does not release the feature to all account at the same time. It is done in phases:

•Day 1 – Stage 1 – early access for designated Enterprise or higher accounts

•Day 1 and 2 – Stage 2 – regular access for standard edition accounts

•Day 2 – Final for Enterprise or Higher edition accounts.

•Typically, the minimum amount of time between the early access and final stages is 12 to 24 hours 

Early access is intended primarily for organizations that desire added certainty that their production accounts will not be affected by full releases.