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EMaguire
Frequent Visitor

UTC time in Power BI Dataflows incorrect?

I have some Power BI Dataflows which are processing data for Power BI Activity Events (in JSON file format). These contains the CreationTime for each record in UTC datetime format - for example '2022-08-05T07:31:55Z'

The 'locale' settings for the dataflow are English (United Kingdom), but the dataflows are incorrectly converting the UTC time to local time when using Table.TransformColumnTypes(PreviousQueryStep, {{"CreationTime", type datetime}}). The record above is being converted to '05/08/2022, 00:31:55'; but it should be '05/08/2022, 08:31:55' (for British Summer Time). 

When I add a column in the Dataflows Query Editor which should return the UTC time - using DateTimeZone.FixedUtcNow() - it actually returns GMT+8. In Power BI Desktop, the same function returns to the correct time (ie. GMT) 

I can use a different M function to change the datetime to the correct local timezone, but am I doing something wrong? It seems to me that this actually a 'bug' in Power BI Dataflows because it seems to think UTC is GMT+8 and not GMT?

Thanks!

Ed

 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
EMaguire
Frequent Visitor

To resolve my own post/question - in case anyone else comes across similar issues and finds this thread:

We found the problem was a result of the time-zone setting on our gateway server, which for some reason was not set correctly. 

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3 REPLIES 3
YalanWu_test
Helper I
Helper I

Hi, @EMaguire ;

I am so glad to hear that your problem has been kindly solved, that I can you kindly mark the reply as a solution to help others having the similar issue and close the case.

 

Best Regards,

EMaguire
Frequent Visitor

To resolve my own post/question - in case anyone else comes across similar issues and finds this thread:

We found the problem was a result of the time-zone setting on our gateway server, which for some reason was not set correctly. 

EMaguire
Frequent Visitor

To update on my own post/question:

From some further testing, my issue seems to be related to our on-premises data gateway, rather than the dataflows. In dataflows which don't use the gateway I get the correct datetime/timezone. But when I use the gateway I get the same issue as above. I'm following up on this internally. 

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