Can you believe Q1 is already over? It’s been a busy start to the year for the Data Cloud. We’ve seen a massive push on AI stability and some long-awaited engineering quality-of-life updates.
Here is a quick digest of what shipped in Jan-Mar 2025 that you should know about.
1. AI & Cortex#
- Cortex Fine-Tuning (GA): We can now fine-tune serverless models (Llama 3, Mistral) with our own data via SQL. This is huge for domain-specific use cases like legal or medical text analysis.
- Cortex Guard: New safety filters to prevent LLMs from generating toxic or inappropriate responses are now enabled by default.
2. DevEx (Developer Experience)#
- Git Integration improvements: Support for full bi-directional sync (write-back to Git) is in public preview.
- Notebooks GA: Snowflake Notebooks are now Generally Available and have replaced Jupyter for many internal data science teams. The intellisense and native SQL/Python cell interoperability are fantastic.
3. Governance#
- Trust Center enforcement: You can now create policies that block warehouse creation if the Trust Center score drops below a certain threshold. Strict, but effective!
4. Performance#
- Query Acceleration Service (QAS) for Warehouses: Now supports varying workloads dynamically. It fundamentally changes how we think about warehouse sizing—we can run smaller warehouses and let QAS handle the spikes.
Editor’s Pick: The “Small” Win#
My favorite update isn’t AI. It’s the new Snowsight Dark Mode update. Finally, true OLED black support rather than just dark grey. My eyes thank you, Snowflake engineering team.
Looking Ahead to Q2#
Q2 is “Summit Season”. We expect big announcements regarding Iceberg performance and the next generation of Native Apps. Stay tuned!