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Elasticsearch time_zone setting does not work for cast datetime expressions #16726

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@aniaan

Description

My time zone is CST, not UTC. Based on some best practices of ES, when we store data, we convert CST time to UTC time for storage, and the corresponding conversion is done by time zone when querying.
When I was using superset, I found two problems

  1. elasticsearch-dbapi does not support passing the time_zone parameter, I tried to fix it and submitted a PR feat(query): add time_zone param preset-io/elasticsearch-dbapi#69, currently waiting for a review, but I can fix it temporarily by pip install <my_github_repo>. It's equivalent to hitting a patch to circumvent the issue.
  2. Once the problem was solved, I found another problem, the time_zone I set didn't work for filtering datetime type fields, but it worked for HISTOGRAM("@timestamp", INTERVAL 1 DAY), I found the reason by checking the ES-SQL documentation, https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/sql-search-api.html#sql-search-api-request-body

(Optional, string) ISO-8601 time zone ID for the search. Several SQL date/time functions use this time zone. Defaults to Z (UTC).

Several SQL date/time functions use this time zone very important!

superset on ES datatime field query, is the use of CAST ('date' AS DATETIME),

def convert_dttm(cls, target_type: str, dttm: datetime) -> Optional[str]:
if target_type.upper() == utils.TemporalType.DATETIME:
return f"""CAST('{dttm.isoformat(timespec="seconds")}' AS DATETIME)"""
return None

time_zone on CAST this way of conversion does not work, only date related functions work, to solve this problem, should use DATETIME_PARSE ('date', '{pattern}') to deal with, time_zone on this function works.

Here are some examples of my steps to demonstrate this in kibana

PUT /library/_bulk?refresh
{"index":{"_id": "Leviathan Wakes"}}
{"name": "Leviathan Wakes", "author": "James S.A. Corey", "release_date": "2021-09-17T13:24:19Z", "page_count": 561}
{"index":{"_id": "Hyperion"}}
{"name": "Hyperion", "author": "Dan Simmons", "release_date": "2021-09-17T19:24:19Z", "page_count": 482}
{"index":{"_id": "Dune"}}
{"name": "Dune", "author": "Frank Herbert", "release_date": "2021-09-18T09:24:19Z", "page_count": 604}

# UTC -> CST
# 2021-09-17T13:24:19Z => 2021-09-17T21:24:19+08:00
# 2021-09-17T19:24:19Z => 2021-09-18T03:24:19+08:00
# 2021-09-18T09:24:19Z => 2021-09-18T17:24:19+08:00


# should be return 2 ,but 1, **because time_zone does not work for CAST**
GET /_sql?format=txt
{
  "query": """
  SELECT * FROM "library" where release_date > CAST('2021-09-17T21:24:19' AS DATETIME)
  """,
  "time_zone": "Asia/Shanghai"
}

    author     |     name      |  page_count   |        release_date         
---------------+---------------+---------------+-----------------------------
Frank Herbert  |Dune           |604            |2021-09-18T17:24:19.000+08:00


## return 2, work!!

GET /_sql?format=txt
{
  "query": """
  SELECT * FROM "library" where release_date > DATETIME_PARSE('2021-09-17 21:24:19', 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss')
  """,
  "time_zone": "Asia/Shanghai"
}

    author     |     name      |  page_count   |        release_date         
---------------+---------------+---------------+-----------------------------
Dan Simmons    |Hyperion       |482            |2021-09-18T03:24:19.000+08:00
Frank Herbert  |Dune           |604            |2021-09-18T17:24:19.000+08:00

The above example should have illustrated the problem, the essence is that CAST this way for the time zone settings do not take effect, this is important for non-UTC users, I think we need to solve it, at present I can think of is

  1. change to DATETIME_PARSE, but there is no such function before ES 7.8.
  2. superset database add global time_zone parameter, the datetime object for filtering should carry the corresponding time zone information, and the format should also carry the time zone information. This way I found by looking at the code that the scope is too wide and will affect other data sources.

If we have to be compatible with users before ES7.8, a compromise solution is to create a separate db_engine_spec for ES7.8 and above, which can be implemented in elasticsearch-dbapi as a separate sqlalchemy ESDialect, the name of which may require some careful thought.

new db_engine_spec

@classmethod
    def convert_dttm(cls, target_type: str, dttm: datetime) -> Optional[str]:
        if target_type.upper() == utils.TemporalType.DATETIME:
            return f"""DATETIME_PARSE('2019-10-13 00:08:00', 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss')"""
        return None

This is the solution I have thought of so far, what do you think?

cc @dpgaspar

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