[jira] [Created] (SPARK-18424) Cumbersome Date Manipulation

["Bill Chambers (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Bill Chambers created SPARK-18424:
-------------------------------------

             Summary: Cumbersome Date Manipulation
                 Key: SPARK-18424
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-18424
             Project: Spark
          Issue Type: Improvement
            Reporter: Bill Chambers
            Priority: Minor


I've found it quite cumbersome to work with dates thus far in Spark, it can be hard to reason about the timeformat and what type you're working with, for instance:

say that I have a date in the format

{code}
2017-20-12
// Y-D-M
{code}

In order to parse that into a Date, I have to perform several conversions.
{code}
  to_date(
    unix_timestamp(col("date"), dateFormat)
    .cast("timestamp"))
   .alias("date")
{code}

I propose simplifying this by adding a to_date function (exists) but adding one that accepts a format for that date. so that you can avoid entirely the above conversion.



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