Could someone help me understand why these two queries are returning different results in bigquery?
select FORMAT_TIMESTAMP('%F %H:%M:%E*S', "2018-10-01 00:00:00" , 'Europe/London')
returns 2018-10-01 01:00:00
select PARSE_TIMESTAMP('%F %H:%M:%E*S', "2018-10-0100:00:00", "Europe/London")
returns 2018-09-30 23:00:00 UTC
As 2018-10-01 is during british summer time (UTC +1), I would’ve expected both queries to return 2018-09-30 23:00:00 UTC
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Answer
The first is given a timestamp which is in UTC. It then converts it to the corresponding time in Europe/London. The return value is a string representing the time in the local timezone.
The second takes a string representation and returns a UTC timestamp. The representation is assumed to be in Europe/London.
So, the two functions are going in different directions, one from UTC to the local time and the other from the local time to UTC.