Firebolt February Release Roundup: Versions 4.12 to 4.14 -> Faster queries, RBAC upgrades, and geospatial boosts

Firebolt has been on a roll with its last three releases, delivering powerful enhancements for performance, usability, and security. Version 4.14 introduced major boosts to data ingestion and external scan speeds, along with the E2E_DURATION_US metric for more precise query latency tracking. In 4.13, Firebolt expanded role-based access control with GRANT ALL ON ACCOUNT and improved Parquet ingestion by supporting deeply nested arrays. Meanwhile, 4.12 brought geospatial improvements, new developer-friendly keyboard shortcuts, and enhanced network policy controls. Across these updates, Firebolt continues to improve speed, scalability, and developer experience—ensuring users can query data faster and more efficiently than ever.

Performance Improvements

4.12 and 4.14 both saw major performance improvements across a variety of features in Firebolt. A quick rundown of all of them:

• Firebolt is now faster when reading external tables with a large number of files. Whether that’s a small table with many tiny files, or a huge table with many files due to its size, expect Firebolt queries on those tables to run as much as 3.5x faster.
• The geospatial functions ST_COVERS, ST_CONTAINS, and ST_INTERSECTS all got significantly faster when there is no intersection between inputs.
• POINT data ingestion into geography is now significantly faster.
• Queries with cross joins or complex joins can now leverage the result cache, so if you’re submitting the same query repeatedly, all submissions after the first one should be lightning fast.
• The REGEXP_LIKE_ANY function got faster by combining all of your regex expressions into a single compiled object instead of evaluating each one separately. So the more regular expressions you are using, the bigger the performance gains you’ll see.

GRANT/REVOKE ALL ON ACCOUNT

Do you want to grant all possible account level permissions available to an account to a specific role?

GRANT ALL ON ACCOUNT my_account TO my_role --does exactly that

Or do you want to do the opposite, removing all of an account level permissions from a specific role?

REVOKE ALL ON ACCOUNT my_account TO my_role --does that, too

These commands can be useful in various scenarios where you need to quickly manage permissions for roles. For example, when creating a new role that you want to grant all account level permissions, the GRANT ALL saves you from having to specify each permission individually. It’s a fast and efficient way to ensure that the role has all the necessary permissions right from the start. Revoking permissions from a role using the REVOKE ALL command ensures that no lingering account level permissions remain.

Deeply-Nested Arrays

In 4.13, Firebolt introduced support for deeply nested arrays in Parquet files, improving its ability to handle complex, semi-structured data. You can now ingest Parquet files with arrays nested at any depth, including structures like ARRAY(ARRAY(ARRAY(STRING))), powering up Firebolt to handle more flexible schema designs and making it a more powerful choice for analytics on hierarchical data structures. It takes advantage of Parquet’s efficiency while dealing with deeply structured data, and should mitigate the headaches of un-nesting the many-layered arrays in order to analyze that data with the low latency that Firebolt has to offer.

Conclusion

Firebolt DB release versions 4.12, 4.13, and 4.14 make Firebolt run faster and smoother, especially if you’ve been leveraging the geospatial public preview. And whether you’re going to get to work with nested arrays or streamline your role-based permissions, we’re excited to bring you these enhancements. Stay tuned for more – there’s a lot in the works, and we’re excited for what 2025 will bring.

For more detailed information, including bug fixes, check out our full release notes here:

https://docs.firebolt.io/Reference/release-notes/release-notes.html