Cortex AI Function Evaluation for measuring quality (Public Preview)

PreviewSep 21, 2026VerifiedAdded Sep 22, 2026

Snowflake Cortex AI Function Evaluation is now available in public preview, enabling customers to measure the output quality, cost, and token usage of custom AI Functions and Cortex AI calls against labeled datasets.

SQL Pricing

Read Snowflake's release notes

https://docs.snowflake.com/en/release-notes/2026/other/2026-09-21-ai-function-evaluation-preview

Summaries of vendors' own notes. Product names and logos belong to their owners; logos via logo.dev.

More Snowflake Cortex AI releases

Snowflake Cortex AISep 21, 2026

Cortex AI Function Optimization for more efficient AI implementations (Public Preview)

Snowflake Cortex AI Function Optimization is now available in public preview, enabling customers to automatically search across prompts and models for improved implementations of custom AI Functions.

PreviewPricingSource

Snowflake Cortex AISep 21, 2026

Cortex Agents Compact API (Preview)

The Cortex Agents Compact API is now available in preview. Use the agent:compact endpoint to summarize a conversation and pass the compact representation to subsequent agent:run requests. Compacting conversation history reduces token consumption and helps conversations stay within the model context window.

PreviewAI agentsDeveloper toolsSource

Snowflake Cortex AISep 16, 2026

Cortex Agents object enhancements (General availability)

The following Cortex Agents object enhancements are now generally available:

GAAI agentsSource

Snowflake Cortex AISep 15, 2026

Embedding Streamlit in Snowflake apps in external pages (General availability)

Embedding Streamlit in Snowflake apps in external pages is now generally available. You can render a container-runtime app inside a page you host, such as a customer portal or an internal dashboard, using a single tag.

GAVector searchStreamingGovernanceSource

Snowflake Cortex AISep 15, 2026

Cortex AI Gateway (Preview)

We are pleased to announce the preview of Cortex AI Gateway, the control plane where you govern how AI applications and third-party agents in your organization reach models.

PreviewAI agentsSecuritySource

Snowflake Cortex AISep 14, 2026

Multimodal AI_SUMMARIZE for automatic theme summarization (Public Preview)

Snowflake Cortex AI_SUMMARIZE is now available in public preview, enabling customers to summarize text and multimodal content, including images and documents, directly in Snowflake.

PreviewSQLData integrationSource

Snowflake Cortex AISep 3, 2026

Restricted Session Scope for agents (General availability)

With this release, Restricted Session Scope (RSS) is generally available. An RSS is a privilege ceiling that limits what an agent can do on behalf of a user. It intersects with RBAC and never grants privileges the user doesn't already have through their roles.

GAAI agentsSource

Snowflake Cortex AISep 2, 2026

Data lineage for Cortex Agents

You can now use data lineage to see which data a Cortex Agent can reach through the tools declared in its specification. A semantic view that a Cortex Analyst tool references, and a Cortex Search service that a Cortex Search tool references, both appear upstream of the agent.

UpdateAI agentsStreamingGovernanceSource

Also shipped on Sep 21, 2026

Google Cloud BigQuerySep 21, 2026

BigQuery Studio query results pane shows recent run history

The Query results pane now shows a short history of recent runs for a query, including multi-statement queries, without switching to the Job history tab. It is generally available.

GASQLSource

Databricks Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformSep 21, 2026

The query history system table is now generally available

The system.query.history system table is now generally available. Use it to access account-wide records for queries run on SQL warehouses or serverless compute, including execution status, duration metrics, and query source. See Query history system table reference .

GASQLObservabilityDeveloper toolsSource

Google Cloud AlloyDBSep 21, 2026

You can now use the AlloyDB Columnar Engine as a read-optimized, in-memory cache for HNSW vector indexes

You can now use the AlloyDB Columnar Engine as a read-optimized, in-memory cache for HNSW vector indexes. This feature is generally available ( GA ). It accelerates vector search performance and increases queries per second (QPS) for vector workloads. For more information, see Accelerate queries with the Columnar Engine .

GAVector searchPerformanceSource

Google Cloud BigQuerySep 21, 2026

BigQuery generative AI functions now support the gemini-3.8-flash Gemini model

BigQuery generative AI functions now support the gemini-3.8-flash Gemini model.

UpdateLLMsSQLSource

Databricks Agent Bricks and Mosaic AISep 21, 2026

Back model provider service credentials with a Unity Catalog secret

Back a model provider service's API key with a customer-owned Unity Catalog secret. The service reads it at query time, so rotating the secret takes effect with no service change. See Back a provider credential with a Unity Catalog secret .

UpdateSQLGovernanceSecuritySource

Databricks Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformSep 21, 2026

Databricks Runtime 19: September 21, 2026

New features and improvements truncate function : SQL and the Scala and Python DataFrame APIs now support truncate , which truncates a number to a specified scale without rounding.

UpdateSQLSource