Reference | How Dataiku handles and displays date and time#

In Dataiku, dates mean an absolute point in time, meaning something that’s expressible as a date and time and timezone.

For example, 2001-01-20T14:00:00.000Z and 2001-01-20T16:00:00.000+0200 refer to the same point in time (14:00Z is 2pm UTC, and 16:00+0200 is 4pm UTC+2, so 2pm UTC too).

Dataiku only displays dates in UTC#

If you use the Format Date processor with a proper ISO8601 format, it will temporarily show it as a different time zone. However, as soon as you write it out or read it in a chart, it will be in UTC again.

If you use a formatter to format as 16:00+0200 and select the output to be a string, then the string value will be preserved. However, it’s not a date anymore.

Dates in SQL#

A date column in SQL will optionally be read in Dataiku as a Dataiku date (that is, an “absolute point in time”), also known as a timestamp with time zone in SQL parlance. When Dataiku reads 2020-02-14 from the SQL table, it has to map it to a time. For that, it assumes that it’s corresponding to midnight, but which midnight?

On an SQL dataset, Dataiku has an “assumed time zone” setting for this. If you select Local as assumed time zone in the settings of a recipe’s input SQL dataset, then Dataiku will consider that it’s reading 2020-02-14 at midnight in Netherlands (for example, if your local TZ on your server is Europe/Amsterdam). Dataiku then displays this in UTC, so 2020-02-13T23:00:00Z. If you want it to show 2020-02-14T00:00:00Z, you must set the assumed time zone to UTC.

Dataiku instance administrators also can set default assumed time zone values in the connection settings so that the time zone is pre-selected.