# Azure Data Factory utcNow() nuances

For those of you who work with Azure Data Factories I thought I’d help you out with, what I would consider a bug in how pipelines work. For the record, I work with pipelines on almost a daily basis, but I am generally pushing data into Microsoft SQL Server. In this specific instance, I am pushing data into Snowflake and that data includes dates.

Microsoft SQL Server is very lenient when it comes to the format of a date it will be ingesting. It can be:

* ‘6/3/2025’
    
* ‘6/03/2025’
    
* ‘06/03/2025’
    
* ‘2025-6-3’
    
* ‘2025-06-3’
    

The list goes on. Snowflake however, is very specific: ‘YYYY-MM-DD’.

The pipeline I was building needed to add a FILEDATE column to the .csv file it was creating that would be ingested by Snowflake. I added the column into the source of the **Copy data** activity as follows:

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1748970635045/ccd2e07e-6839-4931-a0bc-da27546d5010.png align="center")

The expected result would be: “2025-06-03T13:11:00” as per the documentation of the **utcNow()** function.

The result provided:

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1748970736912/6105920d-7d7f-43c9-9368-243256c36237.png align="center")

As I mentioned before, this would be an acceptable datetime in Microsoft SQL Server, so it was never an issue. On ingestion to Snowflake, this blew up. I tried the FormatDate function, I tried **utcNow(‘**yyyy-mm-ddTHH:mm:ss’) and numerous variations of that, all to no avail.

If however, you put the same function call in a variable:

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1748971069386/5ed8c614-917e-42f1-9744-cee1dbb6f941.png align="center")

You get the correct result:

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1748971090403/cb4bbd66-d3d0-4c08-8a26-96addf2ff59d.png align="center")

Then simply use the variable vs the function when adding it to your source.