What timezone is the “timestamp” value on a table's history?

yit337 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:13:15 GMT

Is it UTC, or the local zone of whoever accesses it?

Re: What timezone is the “timestamp” value on a table's history?

szymon_dybczak — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:39:48 GMT

TIMESTAMP values are internally normalized and persisted in UTC, but they are displayed using the current session’s local timezone.

Therefore, it is not based on the timezone of the person who originally performed the write. It depends on the timezone configured for the SQL or Spark session that reads the history.

The Databricks SQL system default is UTC, so it will normally display as UTC unless the session or SQL warehouse timezone has been changed.

You can verify the active timezone with:

SELECT current_timezone();

And force consistent UTC output with:

SET TIME ZONE 'UTC';
DESCRIBE HISTORY catalog.schema.table_name;

topic Re: What timezone is the “timestamp” value on a table's history? in Data Engineering

What timezone is the “timestamp” value on a table's history?

Re: What timezone is the “timestamp” value on a table's history?