How Does Parse_dates Work With Pd.read_sql_query

How is Pandas parse_date supposed to work when retrieving data from a MySQL database? The documentation of Pandas 0.23 gives this information: parse_dates : list or dict, default:

Solution 1:

I pass the field names in a list to parse_dates when I invoke pd.read_sql with:

df= pd.read_sql(query, 
                connection, 
                parse_dates=['Date_of_creation', 
                             'Date_of_termination']
                )

You mentioned doing it with a dictionary for custom formatting:

fmt='%Y%m%d %H:%M:%S'

df= pd.read_sql(query, 
                connection, 
                parse_dates={'Date_of_creation':fmt,
                             'Date_of_termination':fmt}
                )