What inspired this Wish List Request?
Multiple strategic customers with international sites have expressed frustration with our date time support coming in from query builder specifically around time zones. Also with Snowflake and Pandas native time zone support they are experiencing friction with importing and working with those data formats. The issue goes beyond simply stripping out the time zone information using custom format as that information is important to understanding the actual local time attached to a record.
Please describe the new or improved feature or solution you would like to see.
Data tables need the ability to work with time zones similar to the UTC+ and UTC- formats. We should look to the pandas date time package as an inspiration for the functionality (https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html). At a minimum we need to be able to convert something like this:
<SPAN class="hljs-number">2015</SPAN>-02-<SPAN class="hljs-number">24</SPAN> 05:<SPAN class="hljs-number">30</SPAN>:<SPAN class="hljs-number">00-</SPAN>04:0<SPAN class="hljs-number">0</SPAN>
Into something like this:
<SPAN class="hljs-number">2015</SPAN>-02-<SPAN class="hljs-number">24</SPAN> 01:<SPAN class="hljs-number">30</SPAN>:<SPAN class="hljs-number">00<BR /></SPAN>
What would the value be to you and/or other users if this new feature is provided?
Currently customers are expressing frustration around pulling data from sources that use timezone encodings by default. This is making it harder to expand into parts of the company where this data is used more frequently.
Is this an external customer request?
Yes - There have been requests of this type from Wolfspeed (at the 2024 JMP day) as well as Thermofisher previously.
02Oct2024: Additional requests from Wolfspeed (different group than initial request - time zone issues are causing errors when importing data from Snowflake via ODBC. They have a workaround, but are... vexed by the issue), IDEXX (another Snowflake adopter raised as an issue with diagnostic data coming in from field testing units they manufacture.)
Is there a competitive software package that has this feature or solution that we should be aware of?
There is a python package that comes up (highlighted above). Snowflake (as an analytical tool), Power BI, as well as other BI solutions have this capability natively.
Will this impact a renewal, expansion, or adoption at a customer, and does this put an account at risk if we do not address this?
Any major customer with international locations is going to come up against this issue. This isn't necessarily a deal breaker for these customers but it's a friction point that will make other tools look more attractive.
