Converting local time to UTC in snowflake

Question

I have sample data as follows:

ship_id | origin_zone |  dt_local
 1234   | Asia/Taipei| 2022-03-31 00:00:00.000

The goal is to convert dt_local into UTC. Here is my SQL for that:

select 
   origin_zone,
   dt_local,
   convert_timezone('UTC', origin_zone, dt_local) as utc_time
   
from table;

Please see the screenshot for the output. It seems it is just adding an offset of 8 hours to this time, which doesn't sound true. Taipei is 8 hrs ahead of UTC, so I am expecting it to subtract 8 hours from dt_local column.

I think that because I'm running this query in America/Los Angeles time (which is 8 hrs behind UTC), it's just adding 8 to the dt_local time column.

Can I please get some help on how to get the correct UTC time for this column?

Answer 1

You have the source and target timezones reversed. It should be:

select 
   origin_zone,
   dt_local,
   convert_timezone(origin_zone, 'UTC', dt_local) as utc_time
   
from table;