I want to display a timestamp in my timezone, not UTC

Question

I understand when I ingest data into QuestDB, the timestamps are always stored as UTC. This is all good, I get it, but I would like to see the timestamps in my local time zone. I live in Central Europe, my clock says right now it is 20:02, but if I do this

select now();

I am getting:

2024-08-13T18:02:45.878063Z

As you see, I am two hours ahead of UTC. I thought I could convert this just doing

select to_utc(now(), 'CEST');

but it gets even worse, as now it says

2024-08-13T16:02:45.878063Z

I could always leave the UTC, but this being a time-series database I am sure it can be done.

Answer 1

I had it backwards. The to_utc function is to convert from local time to UTC, so it was substracting two hours!!! What I need instead is the to_timezone function. Note what happens when I run this query at 20:05 my local time:

select now(), to_timezone(now(), 'CEST'), to_utc(now(), 'CEST');

now                           to_timezone                   to_utc
===========================   ===========================   ===========================                          
2024-08-13T18:05:18.246232Z   2024-08-13T20:05:18.246232Z   2024-08-13T16:05:18.246232Z