How do I insert a time value in Redshift in a time column? - amazon-web-services

Question

Given the following query
ALTER TABLE public.alldatatypes ADD x_time time ;,
how do I insert a value into x_time?
Time appears to be a valid column type according to the documentation.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/r_Datetime_types.html#r_Datetime_types-time
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_Supported_data_types.html
However, when I try to do an insert, I always get an error.
Insert query: insert into public.alldatatypes(x_time) values('08:00:00');
Error:
SQL Error [500310] [0A000]: Amazon Invalid operation:
Specified types or functions (one per INFO message) not supported on
Redshift tables.;
I do not want to use another column type.
I am testing all the column types defined in the documentation.

Answer 1

That cryptic error message is the one Redshift gives when you try to use a leader-only function as source data for a compute node. So expect you aren't showing the exact code you ran to generated this error. I know that it can seem like you didn't change anything important to the issue but you likely have.
You see select now(); works just fine but insert into <table> select now(); will give the error you are showing. This is because now() is a leader only function. However insert into <table> select getdate(); works great - this is because getdate() is a function that runs on compute nodes.
Now the following SQL runs just fine for me:
create table fred (ttt time);
insert into public.fred(ttt) values('01:23:00'); -- this is more correctly written values('01:23:00':time)
insert into public.fred(ttt) select getdate()::time;
select * from fred;
While this throws the error you are getting:
insert into public.fred(ttt) select now()::time;
So if this doesn't help clear things up please post a complete test case that demonstrates the error.