v4.4.0

• Raised the minimum supported Python version to 3.10, dropping the end-of-life 3.8/3.9, to update the lockfile and clear CVE-flagged dependencies in the repo (#798)
• Fix: REMOVE staging operations no longer require staging_allowed_local_path to be set, since removing a remote file does not touch the local filesystem (#726)
• Report cursor.rowcount for DML on the Thrift backend: INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE/MERGE now set rowcount to the server's affected-row count instead of the hardcoded -1; SELECT (and statements the server does not report a count for) still return -1. executemany aggregates the count across all parameter sets per PEP 249 (#784)