Azure Data Lake Analytics - Output dates as +0000 rather than -0800 - azure

Question

I have a datetime column in an Azure Data Lake Analytics table.
All my incoming data is UTC +0000. When using the below code, all the csv outputs convert the dates to -0800
OUTPUT #data
TO #"/data.csv"
USING Outputters.Text(quoting : false, delimiter : '|');
An example datatime in the output:
2018-01-15T12:20:13.0000000-08:00
Are there any options for controlling the output format of the dates? I don't really understand why everything is suddenly in -0800 when the incoming data isn't.

Answer 1

Currently, ADLA does not store TimeZone information in DateTime, meaning it will always default to the local time of the cluster machine when reading (-8:00 in your case). Therefore, you can either normalize your DateTime to this local time by running
DateTime.SpecifyKind(myDate, DateTimeKind.Local)
or use
DateTime.ConvertToUtc()
to output in Utc form (but note that next time you ingest that same data, ADLA will still default to reading it in offset -0800). Examples below:
#getDates =
EXTRACT
id int,
date DateTime
FROM "/test/DateTestUtc.csv"
USING Extractors.Csv();
#formatDates =
SELECT
id,
DateTime.SpecifyKind(date, DateTimeKind.Local) AS localDate,
date.ConvertToUtc() AS utcDate
FROM #getDates;
OUTPUT #formatDates
TO "/test/dateTestUtcKind_AllUTC.csv"
USING Outputters.Csv();
You can file a feature request for DateTime with offset on our ADL feedback site. Let me know if you have other questions!