This week belonged to Snowflake, which opened its new Expedition event on 3 November with a long list of launches. Databricks shipped smaller but useful changes to its semantic layer and MLflow, BigQuery was quiet after a busy October, and the AI model world moved again. Here is the short list from 28 October to 3 November 2026. Last week's edition covers 21 to 27 October.
Snowflake: Expedition 2026
Snowflake Expedition, 3 November
CoCo Cloud Agents and Automations
The coding agent runs in Snowflake and on a schedule, with restricted session scopes.
Interactive Analytics and Elastic Channels
Sub-second answers for apps and agents, and streaming that scales with volume.
Snowpark Connect for Iceberg and Spark code migration
Run Spark on Snowflake with fewer changes; CoCo rewrites Spark code.
Pipeline Builder, CoCo GitHub integration, Cortex TrainingNow
Visual pipelines, agent changes through pull requests, and post-training open models on your data.
Business OntologyUpcoming
Approved business definitions shared by every agent.
Read the full breakdown in Snowflake Expedition 2026: every announcement that matters.
Databricks
Semantic layer
Beta- Relationships between metric views: declare how two metric views join, with cardinality, so AI assistants and BI tools stop guessing from column names
- Declared with SQL, for example ALTER VIEW ... ADD CONSTRAINT ... MANY TO ONE RELATIONSHIP TO ...
- Not enforced and not used for query optimisation; metadata only
A small feature with a big effect on AI answer quality.
MLflow and governance
Beta and GA- Managed warehouse for MLflow traces (beta): view traces in the MLflow UI without choosing a SQL warehouse
- Higher limits and BROWSE permission for Unity Catalog secrets
- Track Unity Gateway skill usage in audit logs and the usage dashboard
Easier monitoring of AI apps and agents.
Models and connectors
Plan ahead- Microsoft Graph Logs connector in beta for Lakeflow Connect
- Retired: Moonshot AI Kimi K2.7, Thinking Machines Inkling and DeepSeek V4 Pro (0813)
Update any jobs or dashboards that call the retired endpoints.
-- Tell AI assistants and BI tools how orders relate to customers
ALTER VIEW main.sales.orders_mv ADD CONSTRAINT orders_customer
MANY TO ONE RELATIONSHIP TO main.sales.customers_mv
USING (customer_id);BigQuery
No new BigQuery release notes appeared between 28 October and 3 November, after almost 30 in October. If you missed them, our BigQuery October 2026 update covers reusable column aliases, AI.AGG and TimesFM 3.0, and our new BigQuery vs Snowflake comparison puts them in context.
AI models that matter for data teams
- Mistral Large 4 open weights (29 October): about 1 trillion parameters, available on Hugging Face in FP8, NVFP4 and GGUF versions. The licence allows commercial use except selling it as a hosted model service. API price: $0.70 input and $2.10 output per million tokens. See Mistral Large 4, explained.
- Gemini 4 Carbon (28 October): first on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5 with 59.4. See Gemini 4 Carbon, explained.
- A tougher leaderboard: Artificial Analysis launched version 5 of its index with mostly private tests. See the best AI models in November 2026.
- GitHub Octoverse 2026: agents now start over 40% of pull requests. See what it means for data teams.
Check your understanding
1/3What do Databricks relationships between metric views do?
They are metadata only, declared with SQL, and in beta.
2/3Which Snowflake feature for real-time answers is generally available?
Business Ontology is in private preview and Datastream is coming soon.
3/3What should you do about the Databricks model retirements?
Calls to retired endpoints will fail, so move to a current model.
You got 0 out of 3.
More platform news: last week's data platform news, Snowflake vs Databricks for AI agents and Microsoft Fabric vs Databricks.
Sources: Snowflake's Expedition 2026 press release and blog (3 November 2026); Databricks platform release notes (late October and November 2026) and documentation on metric view relationships and the MLflow managed warehouse; BigQuery release notes; Hugging Face and Mistral AI on Mistral Large 4 (29 October 2026). Features roll out by region and edition.
Alessandro Ecclesie AgazziWritten by Alessandro Ecclesie Agazzi, analytics engineer in London. Updated 3 November 2026. About me