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Datetime Data Type

Designer Cloud supports a variety of Datetime formats, each of which has additional variations to it.

Date Range

Supported Date Ranges:

  • Earliest: January 1, 1400

    Note

    Two-digit values for the year that are older than 80 years from the current year are forward-ported into the future in Designer Cloud. This behavior may be different from source and target systems. See "Two-digit year values" below.

  • Latest: December 31, 2599

You can use dates in the Gregorian calendar system only. Dates in the Julian calendar are not supported.

Data Validation

When values are validated against the Datetime data type, theCloud Portaldoes not compare them to an underlying calendar system. Instead, the application validates the values using regular expressions. This regular expression method checks for general Datetime validation and is fast to evaluate.

However, some values may follow the regular expression validation pattern but are not accurate dates. For example, every four years, February 29 is a valid date. When this date is validated against the Datetime data type, it may be detected as a valid value, while the date is changed in the application to be incremented to a close accurate date, such as March 1 in this example.

Formatting Tokens

You can use the following tokens to change the format of a column of dates:

Letter

Date or Time Component

Presentation

Examples

M

Month in year

Number

1

MM

Month in year

Number

01

MMMM

Month in year

Month

January

MMM

Month in year

Month

Jan

yy

Year

Number

16

Note

Two-digit values for the year that are older than 80 years from the current year are forward-ported into the future in Designer Cloud. This behavior may be different from source and target systems. See "Two-digit year values" below.

yyyy

Year

Number

2016

D

Day in year

Number

352

d

Day in month

Number

9

dd

Day in a month

Number

09

EEE

Day in week (three-letter abbreviation)

Text

Wed

EEEE

Day in week

Text

Wednesday

h

Hour in day (1-12)

Note

Requires an AM/PM indicator (a).

Number

2

hh

Hour in am/pm (01-12)

Note

Requires an AM/PM indicator (a).

Number

02

H

Hour in day (1-12)

Number

2

HH

Hour in day (0-23)

Number

20

m

Minute in an hour

Number

9

mm

Minute in an hour

Number

09

s

Second in a minute

Number

3

ss

Second in a minute

Number

03

SSS

Millisecond

Number

218

X

Time zone

ISO 8601 time zone

-08:00

a

AM/PM indicator

String

AM

Note

When publishing to relational targets, Datetime values are written as date/time values in newly created tables. If you are appending to a relational table column that is in timestamp format, Datetime values can be written as timestamps.

Tip

If your DateTime column contains data in multiple formats, you must change the format of the DateTime column to one format and then add a transformation to convert that data to the other format. When all formats of your source date values are converted to a single format, the application should infer the appropriate date and time format.

Supported Separators:

  • Date separators: blank space, comma, single hyphen, or forward slash

  • Time separators: blank space, comma, single hyphen, colon, t or T

  • Non-delimited Datetime values are supported. For example, yyyymmdd, yyyymmddThhmmssX.

ISO 8601 Time Zone Notes:

  • Support for timezone offset from UTC indicated by +hh:mm, +hhmm, or +hh. For example, the date '2013-11-18 11:55-04:00' is recognized as a DateTime value.

  • Datetime part functions (for example, Hour) truncate time zones and return local time.

  • If you have a column with multiple time zones, you can convert the column to Unixtime so you can perform Date/Time operations with a standardized time zone using the UNIXTIME function. If you want to work with local times, you can truncate the time zone or use other Datetime functions.

Two-digit year values

Depending on the system, a two-digit value for year in a Datetime value is subject to different interpretations. In Designer Cloud, two-digit values for the year that are older than 80 years from the current year are forward-ported into the future. For example, in a job run on Dec 31, 2021, the date 01/01/41 is interpreted as 01/01/1941. However, if the job is run the next day (January 01, 2022), then the same data is interpreted as 01/01/2041.

Other systems use different limits for backward versus forward porting of year values:

As a result, it can be a challenge to manage these system-dependent two-digit years in a consistent manner.

Tip

For best results, you should format year values as four-digit values before the data is ingested into Designer Cloud. Four-digit years are consistently represented across all systems.

If the above is not possible, you can create replacement steps in your recipe to convert two-digit years to four-digit values. In the following example, 00-39is interpreted as a 19XXyear, while 40-99is interpreted as a 20XXyear:

Transformation Name

Replace text or pattern

Parameter: Column

myDateColumn

Parameter: Find

/\b([456789][0-9])\b$/

Parameter: Replace with

19$1

and

Transformation Name

Replace text or pattern

Parameter: Column

myDateColumn

Parameter: Find

/\b([0123][0-9])\b$/

Parameter: Replace with

20$1

Supported Datetime Formats

For more information on the available formats and examples of each one, see Datetime Formats (PDF).

You can use the DATEFORMAT function to modify the formatting of your Datetime values.

Supported Time Zones

Time zones values (e.g. UTC-08:00) are supported.

Job Execution

Datetime data typing involves the basic type definition, plus any supported formatting options. Depending on where the job is executed, there may be variation in how the Datetime data type is interpreted.

  • Some running environments may perform additional inference on the typing.

    Note

    During job execution on Spark, inputs of Datetime data type may result in row values being inferred for data type individually. For example, the String value 01/10/2020 may be inferred by date transformations as 1st Oct, 2020 or 10th Jan, 2020. Resulting outputs of Datetime values may not be deterministic in this scenario.

  • Some formatting options may not be supported.

Differences between Trifacta Photon and Spark running environments

If your Datetime data does not contain time zone information, by default:

  • Spark uses the time zone of the Alteryx node for Datetime values.

    Tip

    This use of time zone applies to any Spark-based running environment, such as EMR.

  • Trifacta Photon uses the UTC time zone for Datetime values.

This difference in how the values are treated can result in differences in Datetime-based calculations, such as the DATEDIF function.

Workarounds:

You can do one of the following:

  • Set the time zone for the Alteryx node to be UTC. You must also set the time zone for your Spark running environment to UTC.

  • Apply the following Spark execution properties from the Run Job page:

    "spark": 
  "props": {
    ...
    "spark.driver.extraJavaOptions" : "-Duser.timezone=\"UTC\"",
    "spark.executor.extraJavaOptions" : "-Duser.timezone=\"UTC\""
  }
  ...
}

Datetime Schema via API

When Datetime data is returned via API calls, the schema for this information is returned as a three-element array. The additional elements to the specific are required to account for formatting options of for Datetime values.

Tip

Schema information for data types is primarily available via API calls. You may find schema information for columns in JSON versions of the visual profile and flow definitions when they are exported.

Example:

"end_date": [
            "Datetime",
            "mm-dd-yy",
            "mm*dd*yyyy"
        ]

Array Element

Description

Example 1

Example 2

Data type

The internal name for the data type. For Datetime columns, this schema value should always be Datetime.

"Datetime"
"Datetime"

Sub-format

The general format category of the data type

"mm-dd-yy"

"mm-dd-yy"

Format type

The specific formatting for the data type

"mm*dd*yyyy"
"shortMonth*dd*yy"
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