Release notes

Firebolt continuously releases updates so that you can benefit from the latest and most stable service. These updates might happen daily, but we aggregate release notes to cover a longer time period for easier reference. The most recent release notes from the latest version are below.

See the Release notes archive for earlier-version release notes.

Firebolt might roll out releases in phases. New features and changes may not yet be available to all accounts on the release date shown.

Firebolt Release Notes - Version 4.20

New Features

Introduced the ARRAYS_OVERLAP function to identify shared elements in input arrays
Introduced the ARRAYS_OVERLAP function to determine if two or more input arrays share common elements. This enhancement enables users to identify overlapping array elements, improving data analysis capabilities.

Added the NGRAM function to generate overlapping n-grams from text
Added a new scalar function: NGRAM. The function NGRAM(n, text) generates a sequence of overlapping n-grams from the given text. Each n-gram is a contiguous substring of n characters. It returns the result as an SQL array of text. This function is useful for text analysis and can help in search queries.

Example:

SELECT ngram(4, 'abc😊def');

Results:

{abc😊,bc😊d,c😊de,😊def}

Added support for VALUES lists to create constant tables
Added support for VALUES lists to create an in-memory constant table with one or multiple rows for use in queries. For example:

SELECT * FROM (VALUES (1, 'one'), (2, 'two'), (3, 'three')) AS t (num, letter);

is effectively equivalent to:

SELECT 1 AS num, 'one' AS letter
UNION ALL
SELECT 2, 'two'
UNION ALL
SELECT 3, 'three';

Syntactically, VALUES can be used anywhere a SELECT is allowed.

Added support for $$ to quote multiline string literals containing newlines and single quotes
Added support for $$ to quote string literals that contain newlines and single quotes. This enhancement helps users create multiline strings without needing to escape special characters, making SQL scripts easier to read and maintain. For example:

SELECT $$
That's a 
   multi-line
     string
       literal
$$

Performance Improvements

Improved Aggregating index scan performance by eliminating unnecessary re-aggregation
The Aggregating index scan now detects when data is already fully aggregated. It directly projects results without re-aggregating. This improvement reduces query latency and increases performance for applicable workloads.

Enhanced schema discovery performance for Parquet files in COPY FROM and READ_PARQUET() functions
Enhanced the performance of Automatic Schema Discovery for Parquet files in the COPY FROM command and the READ_PARQUET() function. This improvement accelerates data loading and processing for users.

Bug Fixes

Fixed the information_schema.tables.ddl output for tables using TO_... family of functions in the partition expression
Fixed the information_schema.tables.ddl output for tables with a partition expression such as TO_YYYYMMDD. This update ensures that the expression no longer incorrectly results in the TO_YEARMONTHDAY function.