Unclear error is printed when wrong event_timestamp column type is used

When running feast materialize-incremental 2022-01-01T00:00:00 on a parquet source that contains to a string based event_timestamp column, the following exception is printed.

Materializing 1 feature views to 2022-01-01 00:00:00-08:00 into the sqlite online store.

fake_data_fv from 2021-05-21 02:11:51-07:00 to 2022-01-01 00:00:00-08:00:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/willem/.pyenv/versions/3.7.7/bin/feast", line 8, in <module>
    sys.exit(cli())
  File "/home/willem/.pyenv/versions/3.7.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages/click/core.py", line 829, in __call__
    return self.main(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/willem/.pyenv/versions/3.7.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages/click/core.py", line 782, in main
    rv = self.invoke(ctx)
  File "/home/willem/.pyenv/versions/3.7.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages/click/core.py", line 1259, in invoke
    return _process_result(sub_ctx.command.invoke(sub_ctx))
  File "/home/willem/.pyenv/versions/3.7.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages/click/core.py", line 1066, in invoke
    return ctx.invoke(self.callback, **ctx.params)
  File "/home/willem/.pyenv/versions/3.7.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages/click/core.py", line 610, in invoke
    return callback(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/willem/.pyenv/versions/3.7.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages/click/decorators.py", line 21, in new_func
    return f(get_current_context(), *args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/willem/.pyenv/versions/3.7.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages/feast/cli.py", line 270, in materialize_incremental_command
    end_date=datetime.fromisoformat(end_ts),
  File "/home/willem/.pyenv/versions/3.7.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages/feast/telemetry.py", line 151, in exception_logging_wrapper
    result = func(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/willem/.pyenv/versions/3.7.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages/feast/feature_store.py", line 379, in materialize_incremental
    tqdm_builder,
  File "/home/willem/.pyenv/versions/3.7.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages/feast/infra/local.py", line 193, in materialize_single_feature_view
    end_date=end_date,
  File "/home/willem/.pyenv/versions/3.7.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages/feast/infra/offline_stores/file.py", line 208, in pull_latest_from_table_or_query
    lambda x: x if x.tzinfo is not None else x.replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc)
  File "/home/willem/.pyenv/versions/3.7.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pandas/core/series.py", line 3848, in apply
    mapped = lib.map_infer(values, f, convert=convert_dtype)
  File "pandas/_libs/lib.pyx", line 2329, in pandas._libs.lib.map_infer
  File "/home/willem/.pyenv/versions/3.7.7/lib/python3.7/site-packages/feast/infra/offline_stores/file.py", line 208, in <lambda>
    lambda x: x if x.tzinfo is not None else x.replace(tzinfo=pytz.utc)
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'tzinfo'

Instead, we should validate types during materialize and print a clearer error message.

[fcas]

@sgvarsh the workaround that I found:

from pyspark.sql.functions import to_timestamp

conf = SparkConf().setMaster(SPARK_MASTER)
# FEAST does not work with INT96 (this is the default type using pyspark 
# to write parquet files containing timestamp fields, 
# another option is to use string based timestamps, but...)
# https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PARQUET-323
# https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56582539/how-to-save-spark-dataframe-to-parquet-without-using-int96-format-for-timestamp
# FEAST works with TIMESTAMP_MICROS (I did not try TIMESTAMP_MILLIS)
conf.set("spark.sql.parquet.outputTimestampType", "TIMESTAMP_MICROS")
spark_context = SparkContext(conf=conf)
sql_context = SQLContext(spark_context)
df = sql_context.read.csv(path)
df = df.withColumn("event_timestamp", to_timestamp(df.event_timestamp, "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSSSSZ"))
## FEAST cannot read a directory with .parquet files
df.coalesce(1).write.mode("overwrite").parquet('output.parquet')

Inspecting the file output.parquet:

############ Column(event_timestamp) ############
name: event_timestamp
path: event_timestamp
max_definition_level: 1
max_repetition_level: 0
physical_type: INT64
logical_type: Timestamp(isAdjustedToUTC=true, timeUnit=microseconds, is_from_converted_type=false, force_set_converted_type=false)
converted_type (legacy): TIMESTAMP_MICROS

Reading the feature view:

training_df = fs.get_historical_features(
        entity_df=entity_df,
        features=[
            "feature_view:***",
            "feature_view:***",
            "feature_view:***",
        ],
).to_df()

print("----- Feature schema -----\n")
print(training_df.info())

print()
print("----- Example features -----\n")
print(training_df.head(8))

----- Feature schema -----

<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 5 entries, 0 to 4
Data columns (total 5 columns):
     Column                 Non-Null Count        Dtype              
---  ------                 --------------        -----              
 0   feast_id                     5 non-null      object             
 1   event_timestamp              0 non-null      datetime64[ns, UTC]
 2   ***                          5 non-null      object             
 3   ***                          5 non-null      object             
 4   ***                          5 non-null      object             
dtypes: `datetime64[ns, UTC](1)`,  `object(4)`
memory usage: 240.0+ bytes

----- Example features -----

   feast_id                              ...      ***
0  12f8cbcf-286a-44f6-a84d-e6d9a8fe902a  ...      ***
1  c47e2260-87eb-4748-b63f-cfda3c7fd258  ...      ***
2  7e835362-4ed8-41ed-b81d-7591b38c151d  ...      ***
3  24fa1717-5e92-4a57-bd19-0b3e851ea357  ...      ***
4  8ce9e852-3a4d-4e96-95dc-fa809481c08a  ...      ***

[5 rows x 5 columns]

[fcas]

@woop do you know some workaround for this issue? It’s a stale issue, but the same problem existis even in the version 0.19.4 =/