What is the best practice for using durations in OPAL?

Use durations when applicable

Time is a first order property on the Observability Cloud. For legacy reasons, you may see definitions which surface duration as a number.

This representation is outdated. Use a duration type instead, which can be inferred when you subtract one time column from another.

Using a duration type will allow the UI to render a better visualization and pretty-print the value.

Bad OPAL:

make_col duration_seconds:float64(end_time - start_time) / int64(duration_sec(1))

Good OPAL:

make_col duration:end_time-start_time