Using Time Zone Shifting

Note: For those sites migrated post the 2023.08 maintenance window, Birst has adopted the Infor standard that establishes the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as the time standard. The Processing Time Zone uses UTC and so, using functions like NOW and NOWDATE are impacted by this change. If you have not changed the Processing Time Zone default setting in Space Properties, then Birst uses UTC for the time standard. See KB Article 2303325 for more information on this change.

Caution:

You must log out and log back in to the application for any changes to the Processing Time Zone to take affect.

The Birst Server Local Time is in UTC, however this does not mean your data will be transformed to UTC by default. Time shifts are solely based on differences between the space's processing time zone and each source's input time zone, and all source input time zones are marked as Same as Processing Time Zone by default. We recommend that you change the space's Processing Time Zone to a specific time zone if you would like to apply time zone shifts to your input data.

Time shifts only apply when the data source time zone and processing time zone are set to different values.


Processing Time Zone	Data Source Time Zone	Expected Behavior
Server Local Time	Same as Processing Time Zone	Dates do not change when persisted or queried.
Server Local Time	Any Other Time Zone	Dates shifted when persisted, and shifted dates are shown when queried.
Any Other Time Zone	Same as Processing Time Zone	Dates do not change when persisted or queried.
Any Other Time Zone	Time Zone different than Processing Time Zone	Dates shifted when persisted, and shifted dates are shown when queried.

Note: Time zone shifting is not allowed for scripted sources due to the fact that users may accidentally apply time zone shifts to data more than once. We recommend that you first apply time zone shifts to the underlying base sources that the script is based on.

If you want to apply an offset to this data in order to make it conform to the time zone of the data in the rest of the space, make these changes:

Change the Processing Time Zone setting for the space to your corporate time zone.
Change the input Time Zone of the source you want to offset to the time zone that the source's data is in.