I am running this query through beeline and it transforms my string value from string to timestamp successfully. select cast(regexp_replace(createdatetime,'(\\d{4})-(\\d{2})-(\\d{2})T(\\d{2}):(\\d{2}):(\\d{2}).(\\d{3})Z','$1-$2-$3 $4:$5:$6.$7') as timestamp) as thetime from L2_view where load_dt='20170908' and createdatetime is not null; When I run the same query through spark sqlContext I get nulls. sqlContext.sql("select cast(regexp_replace(createdatetime,'(\\d{4})-(\\d{2})-(\\d{2})T(\\d{2}):(\\d{2}):(\\d{2}).(\\d{3})Z','$1-$2-$3 $4:$5:$6.$7') as timestamp) as thetime from L2_view where load_dt='20170908' and createdatetime is not null").show +-------+ |thetime| +-------+ +-------+ Can you explain why this happens? I am running Spark 1.6. ... View more