One of the great things about being a Snowflake customer is you’ll never have to perform upgrades and patches. Snowflake performs upgrades and patches for you, transparently with no down time or degraded performance.

Upgrades and patches happen so seamlessly, I suspect most customers would have no idea what release of the Snowflake platform they’re currently running. I know I don’t. That’s a good thing. Old features keep working as Snowflake enables new features on an ongoing basis.

There are times when it’s useful to know what version of Snowflake you’re running. You can check what version of Snowflake you’re running using the CURRENT_VERSION() function:

select CURRENT_VERSION();

At the time of this writing, the current version of Snowflake is 4.39.5. There are situations where it’s useful to know when Snowflake performed upgrades and patches over time. For example, if you have a SQL statement that you didn’t change and it performed differently than before, one explanation could be a change of Snowflake version.

You can check your Snowflake version over time running this statement:

select      to_date(min(START_TIME))  as START_DATE,
            to_date(max(START_TIME))  as END_DATE,
            RELEASE_VERSION           as SNOWFLAKE_VERSION
from        "SNOWFLAKE"."ACCOUNT_USAGE"."QUERY_HISTORY"
group by    RELEASE_VERSION
having      START_DATE >= current_date - 30   -- Check upgrades for previous 30 days 
order by    START_DATE desc;

If you see a change in version between the times your regularly run statement executed differently, that could be one possibility. To help confirm that, you can go to the query history in the Snowflake UI and examine the query profiles for each query. If they look the same, the version upgrade isn’t the explanation for the difference. If they look different, the version upgrade could be a possible reason.