Load timestamp-data as timestamp_tz

[larsrinn]

I have a tap which generates data with DateTimeType. Unfortunately, when loaded into Snowflake, the timezone information vanishes and data is stored as timestamp_ntz. Am I doing something wrong? I would like to have it as timestamp_tz

[edgarrmondragon]

I think that's hardcoded here:

https://github.com/MeltanoLabs/target-snowflake/blob/b79dbd3c0d8dcc1a6d2d39ec94d04be4b0002077/target_snowflake/connector.py#L284

Perhaps we could add a new target setting to switch to mapping from JSON date-time strings to TIMESTAMP_TZ.

PRs welcome!

[larsrinn]

How would that work? Wouldn't it be required for the tap's schema to claim a given column has datetime-values with timezone information? I didn't find such an option in the Singer-SDK.

[edgarrmondragon]

How would that work? Wouldn't it be required for the tap's schema to claim a given column has datetime-values with timezone information? I didn't find such an option in the Singer-SDK.

In short, what I mean is we could add a user-level setting, e.g. use_timestamp_tz to decide if the target uses TIMESTAMP_NTZ (the default) or TIMESTAMP_TZ.

---

The JSON Schema spec, which the target uses to determine column types, expects rfc3339 date-times^1 but by default there's enforcement of that specific format, so expecting a full rfc3339 string by default might break some users' pipelines.

[larsrinn]

So what you're saying is:

• The JSON-schema-spec defines date-time as timestamps with timezone information
• For whatever reason (?) target-snowflake maps this to timestamp_ntz columns and hence, throwing away the timezone information
• Changing the default parameter would break user's pipelines. Hence, you propose to introduce a new parameter to determine whether date-time should be mapped to timestamp_tz or timestamp_ntz, defaulting to timestamp_ntz?

[edgarrmondragon]

All correct. In short, I worry that timestamp_tz might cast datetime strings differently and might not accept something like 2020-01-01T00:00:00 (i.e. without a tz component), which users might be currently sending to the target.

I worry that timestamp_tz might cast datetime strings differently and might not accept something like 2020-01-01T00:00:00

Is that something you could confirm? Essentially I want to validate how snowflake handles a few cases:

-- date
'2020-01-01'::TIMESTAMP_NTZ
'2020-01-01'::TIMESTAMP_TZ

-- date-time without tz
'2020-01-01T00:00:00'::TIMESTAMP_NTZ
'2020-01-01T00:00:00'::TIMESTAMP_TZ

-- date-time with offset
'2020-01-01T00:00:00+00:00'::TIMESTAMP_NTZ
'2020-01-01T00:00:00+00:00'::TIMESTAMP_TZ

-- date-time with Z
'2020-01-01T00:00:00+00:00Z'::TIMESTAMP_NTZ
'2020-01-01T00:00:00+00:00Z'::TIMESTAMP_TZ