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:

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

The result provided:

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:

You get the correct result:

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