Date importing in different time zones

mseedsmseeds RapidMiner Certified Analyst, Member Posts: 2 Contributor I
My team and I sit in different time zones. I created a data set on our server where the first row reads Mar 1, 2019. Because I provided no time, it sets my time as midnight. My time zone is in Texas, CST. If I copy and paste that value into a notepad it comes in as: 
Fri Mar 01 00:00:00 CST 2019
My teammate sits in California and the date is displayed to him as Feb 28, 2019. His timezone is 2 hours behind mine. When he copies and pastes it reads
Thu Feb 28 22:00:00 PST 2019

We are running into other date-time issues in joins because of this based on who imported the file to their system, appended or joined, and then shared the results. We have data sets where the date is displaying as off by one day for one of us, or having problems joining on date because of the 2 hour time difference. 

What is the best practice for importing dates when you know you'll be working across time zones? We are currently exploring a workaround to import the dates as nominals and then use the community building block to transform them into RapidMiner dates, but that feels like a clumsy solution. 

Thanks,
Maggie
@sgenzer

Best Answers

Answers

  • varunm1varunm1 Moderator, Member Posts: 1,207 Unicorn
    Hello @mseeds

    You can check time zone  in Settings --> Preferences --> General. I think it would be better to follow a standard time like GMT or UTC so that system time doesn't affect your process (or) people in different time zones can set their studio time zone similar to server time zone. But, if you change something on the server, then change it everywhere (Studio).

    Here is a detailed explanation:
    https://community.rapidminer.com/discussion/36312/change-system-time

    @rfuentealba your insights are helpful here.

    Hope this helps. 
    Regards,
    Varun
    https://www.varunmandalapu.com/

    Be Safe. Follow precautions and Maintain Social Distancing

  • mseedsmseeds RapidMiner Certified Analyst, Member Posts: 2 Contributor I
    Hi Rod - 
    Thanks for all the background info! For my use case, I only need the date value as I'm aggregating rows to the date level. To clarify, is your suggestion to transform all dates to nominal and not use date types? That seems to be a bit of a bandaid since I want to be able to use date functions (e.g. extract day of week). 

    rfuentealba
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