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.

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

DB version 4.6

September 2024

Behavior Changes

Introduced SHOW CATALOGS statement and aliased SHOW DATABASES to it while deprecating SHOW DATABASE X

A new statement SHOW CATALOGS now acts as an alias for SHOW DATABASES. The statement SHOW DATABASE X is no longer supported.

COPY FROM now unzips Parquet files with gzip extensions

Before version 4.6, the COPY FROM command did not apply file-level decompression to Parquet files with a .gzip or .gz extension. The command treated these files as standard Parquet files, assuming that any compression existed only within the internal Parquet format structure.

With the release of version 4.6, COPY FROM now processes Parquet files similarly to other formats. When a Parquet file has a .gz or .gzip extension, the command will first decompress the file before reading it as a Parquet format file. Hence, it will now fail while reading internally compressed Parquet files with gzip extensions. Users experiencing issues with loading files after this change should contact the support team at support@firebolt.io for assistance.

New Features

COPY TO support for the SNAPPY compression type

COPY TO now supports SNAPPY as a new compression option for Parquet files. This enhancement offers greater flexibility for managing file size and performance, particularly for workloads requiring faster compression. Each file is written in Parquet format, with the specified compression applied to the data pages in the column chunks.

COPY FROM support for filtering by source file metadata

COPY FROM now supports filtering by source file metadata using the WHERE clause.

Added support for vector distance calculations with new functions

Firebolt has added support for vector distance and similarity calculations with the following new functions: VECTOR_COSINE_DISTANCE, VECTOR_MANHATTAN_DISTANCE, VECTOR_EUCLIDEAN_DISTANCE, VECTOR_SQUARED_EUCLIDEAN_DISTANCE, VECTOR_COSINE_SIMILARITY, and VECTOR_INNER_PRODUCT.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a rare bug that caused some query failures from incorrect computation of cacheable subresults

Fixed a rare bug impacting the logic that determined which subresults could be cached and reused. This issue could have caused query failures in certain patterns, but it did not impact the accuracy of the query outcomes.

Updated name of aggregatefunction2 to aggregatefunction in explain output

The name aggregatefunction2 has been updated to aggregatefunction in the EXPLAIN output.

Fixed incorrect results in ARRAY_AGG expressions by excluding NULL values for false conditions in aggregating indexes

Aggregate expressions like ARRAY_AGG(CASE WHEN <cond> THEN <column> ELSE NULL END) previously returned incorrect results by excluding NULL values for rows when the condition was FALSE.