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Data

Weekly, source-backed updates for data on Google Cloud — anything in scope for the domain — plus notable moves across the wider industry. Newest first.

Week of Oct 12 – Oct 18, 2026​

What changed in Google Cloud​

  • BigQuery can now copy tables across regions, generally available. — BigQuery release notes, Oct 15
  • GoogleSQL column aliases, which let a query reference a SELECT alias later in the same SELECT list or in WHERE, are generally available as an opt-in feature and ease migrations from Snowflake and Teradata. — BigQuery release notes, Oct 15
  • The AI.AGG function for semantically aggregating unstructured data with natural-language instructions is now generally available, and BigQuery generative AI functions now support the generally available gemini-4-argon model. — BigQuery release notes, Oct 13
  • BigQuery conversational analytics can now hold conversations across all data sources in multiple projects or with a whole dataset, and its agents can be published in Gemini Enterprise, all generally available. — BigQuery release notes, Oct 14
  • The Apache Hive catalog endpoint in the Lakehouse runtime catalog and metadata migration from Dataproc Metastore to Lakehouse are now generally available. — Lakehouse release notes, Oct 14
  • Private Service Connect is now the default private IP option when creating Cloud SQL for MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server instances in a new project; private services access can still be chosen. — Google Cloud release notes, Oct 13
  • Managed Airflow (Gen 3) development mode environments and environment hibernation are now generally available, and upgrade rollbacks are rolling out, starting in europe-north1, europe-west3, us-east1 and us-west2. — Managed Service for Apache Airflow release notes, Oct 13
  • Incremental transfers in the BigQuery Data Transfer Service for PostgreSQL and ServiceNow are now generally available. — BigQuery release notes, Oct 12
  • Cloud Storage object enrichments, which apply Google's pre-trained models to images and PDFs and attach the results as object contexts that can be queried in BigQuery through Storage Insights datasets, are in preview. — Cloud Storage release notes, Oct 13
  • Dataform's preserveGovernanceControls option, which keeps BigQuery data policies and governance tags on tables across executions, is now generally available. — Dataform release notes, Oct 14
  • Looker (Google Cloud core) instances on Looker 26.18 or later can use Workforce Identity Federation for sign-in, in preview. — Looker release notes, Oct 12

Week of Oct 4 – Oct 11, 2026​

What changed in Google Cloud​

  • Lakehouse added change data capture ingestion from Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg tables into Lakehouse Iceberg tables through Dataflow jobs, in preview. — Lakehouse release notes, Oct 6
  • Flexible column names, which allow spaces, hyphens and Unicode in column names, are now on by default and generally available for BigQuery Iceberg external and managed tables and for Iceberg tables managed by the Lakehouse runtime catalog. — Lakehouse release notes, Oct 8
  • BigQuery's AI.EMBED, AI.SIMILARITY and AI.GENERATE_EMBEDDING functions now generally support the multimodal gemini-embedding-2 model for text, images, audio, video and PDFs. — BigQuery release notes, Oct 5
  • Conversational analytics in BigQuery can now call the AI.CAUSAL_EFFECT function to quantify the impact of interventions on time series data, in preview. — BigQuery release notes, Oct 6
  • The BigQuery Data Engineering Agent is now generally available in the Tokyo (asia-northeast1) regional endpoint. — BigQuery release notes, Oct 9
  • Cloud SQL for MySQL now supports blue-green deployments in preview, keeping a logically replicated green copy of production for changes such as MySQL 8.0 to 8.4 upgrades and switching over with minimal downtime. — Cloud SQL for MySQL release notes, Oct 8
  • Private Service Connect instances created on or after September 30, 2026 with 16 or more vCPUs now support up to 100,000 concurrent connections on Cloud SQL for MySQL and up to 129,024 on Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. — Cloud SQL for MySQL release notes, Oct 6
  • Looker Data Apps, freeform dashboards built by local coding agents such as Gemini CLI, Claude Code or Cursor while staying bound to the LookML semantic layer, are in preview. — Looker release notes, Oct 9
  • Looker Conversational Analytics now supports scheduled agentic workflows in preview, delivering recurring AI-generated summaries, tables and reports to email or Slack, and Looker CI now includes a configurable LookML Style Validator. — Looker release notes, Oct 9
  • Looker 26.20, rolling out from October 12, changes self-service modeling so it is available only when a role granting create_self_service_from_table also selects the connection through its model set. — Looker release notes, Oct 8
  • Knowledge Catalog data products now generally support Looker (Google Cloud core) assets, including dashboards, Explores and LookML models. — Knowledge Catalog release notes, Oct 5
  • New Managed Service for Apache Kafka clusters use a changed format for bootstrap addresses and broker URLs. — Managed Service for Apache Kafka release notes, Oct 9
  • Datastream now replicates SQL Server GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY spatial data types. — Datastream release notes, Oct 9

Week of Sep 27 – Oct 3, 2026​

What changed in Google Cloud​

  • The Rust SDK for BigQuery is now generally available. — BigQuery release notes, Oct 2
  • BigQuery's Security Center, for analyzing your data security profile and managing row- and column-level security policies and data governance from the Google Cloud console, is now generally available. — BigQuery release notes, Sep 30
  • Chatting with graphs in BigQuery's conversational analytics, which lets users combine multiple graphs, tables, views, and UDFs in a single conversation, is now generally available. — BigQuery release notes, Oct 1
  • Dataform now generally supports automated metadata enrichment and Knowledge Catalog data quality scorecard integration for Dataform workflows and BigQuery pipelines. — Dataform release notes, Oct 1
  • Bigtable now generally supports Google Cloud Data Agent Kit for browsing instances and tables, designing schemas, and running GoogleSQL queries. — Bigtable release notes, Oct 1

Industry​

  • Commentary: Snowflake Cortex AI Functions now automatically cache and reuse AI_COMPLETE call results, so an identical repeated call returns the stored result instead of re-running inference, and cache hits are not billed — a useful cost-control pattern to compare against BigQuery's own generative AI functions. — Snowflake release notes, Sep 29

Week of Sep 20 – Sep 26, 2026​

What changed in Google Cloud​

  • Cloud SQL for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server added general availability of the C4 machine series for Enterprise Plus edition instances across eight regions. — Cloud SQL release notes, Sep 21
  • BigQuery generative AI functions now support the gemini-3.8-flash model. — BigQuery release notes, Sep 21
  • BigQuery's cross-cloud Lakehouse added Workday Data Lake as a remote catalog provider, in preview, enabling federated queries on Workday data without migrating it. — BigQuery release notes, Sep 21
  • BigQuery data agents can now be published to Gemini Enterprise by registering them with Agent Registry using Google-managed credentials, in preview, removing the need for manual credential setup when both services share a project and Agent Gateway region. — BigQuery release notes, Sep 22

Industry​

  • Commentary: Snowflake released Cortex AI Function Evaluation in public preview, letting teams measure the output quality, cost, and token usage of custom AI Functions against labeled datasets to establish repeatable baselines — a useful comparison point for anyone building and evaluating BigQuery generative AI functions. — Snowflake release notes, Sep 21

Week of Sep 14 – Sep 20, 2026​

What changed in Google Cloud​

  • Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL now supports the pg_textsearch extension for full-text search using the BM25 scoring algorithm, requiring PostgreSQL 17 or later. — Cloud SQL release notes, Sep 14
  • Cloud SQL for MySQL and PostgreSQL now enable point-in-time recovery in a separate, asynchronous operation after disaster-recovery switchover and replica-failover complete, so those operations finish faster. — Cloud SQL release notes, Sep 17
  • Unit tests for BigQuery pipelines, which validate SQL transformation logic against mock datasets, are now generally available. — BigQuery release notes, Sep 17
  • Unit tests for Dataform actions, which test actions against mock data with an expected result set, are now generally available. — Dataform release notes, Sep 17
  • Spanner queues are now generally available, providing transactional messaging for building event-driven applications on Spanner. — Spanner release notes, Sep 17

Week of Sep 6 – Sep 12, 2026​

What changed in Google Cloud​

  • BigQuery's conversational analytics gained three new functions in preview, ML.CORRELATION, ML.METRICS, and AI.CAUSAL_EFFECT, for computing statistical correlations, evaluation metrics, and causal-effect estimates directly from a table. — BigQuery release notes, Sep 10
  • BigQuery's conversational analytics now supports predictive modeling questions through the AI.PREDICT function, in preview. — BigQuery release notes, Sep 8
  • Regional endpoints for the Cloud SQL Admin API reached general availability for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server, letting you pin Admin API calls to a specific region. — Cloud SQL release notes, Sep 8
  • Appending sqlcommenter tags via the sql_commenter_enabled parameter when executing SQL queries through a Cloud SQL remote MCP server is temporarily disabled for Cloud SQL for MySQL and PostgreSQL. — Cloud SQL release notes, Sep 10
  • The deprecation of Looker Mobile (Legacy) has been postponed to January 31, 2027, giving teams still on the legacy app more time to migrate. — Looker release notes, Sep 9
  • The Looker extension for VS Code, which enables local LookML development and AI-assisted coding through the Model Context Protocol, is now generally available. — Looker release notes, Sep 10
  • AlloyDB for PostgreSQL now lets you monitor the status, throughput, and backlog of the audit logging pipeline using Cloud Monitoring. — AlloyDB release notes, Sep 11

Industry​

  • Commentary: Snowflake added external secret providers in preview, letting Snowflake read credentials directly from AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, or Google Cloud Secret Manager via workload identity federation instead of duplicating secrets inside Snowflake — a useful pattern to compare against for anyone managing secrets across BigQuery and Snowflake side by side. — Snowflake release notes, Sep 10