BigQuery - timestamp offset not working with insertAll / Streaming?

Question

I'm using the python bigquery api. I'm streaming data into a table and would like to store the data record generation timestamp in both UTC and the local time where the data was generated.

I'm passing in the following:

...
"timestamp_utc": "2014-04-04 09:01:10.762137+00:00",
"timestamp_local_time": "2014-04-04 11:01:10.762137+02:00",
...

Both of these result in columns with the time stored as 09:01:10 UTC. Is this a known limitation or am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

The Bigquery timestamp time does not record a timezone. The input time is always converted to and stored in UTC. Queries and table reads return the timestamp as a unix timestamp expressed as floating point seconds since the epoch 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. The Web UI always renders times in the UTC timezone.

So to summarize the two times in your example are equivalent as far as the BigQuery timestamp type is concerned.