I am a bit confused by this feature too especialyl since hive now has a lock table function. Changing existing semantics would be bad. Different storage handlers actually treat external differently as well.
On 6/1/12, Mark Grover <grover.markgro...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi folks, > I have a question regarding HIVE 2837( > https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-2837) that deals with > disallowing external table from using insert into queries. > > From looking at the JIRA, it seems like it applies to external tables on > HDFS as well. Technically, insert into should be ok for external tables on > HDFS (and S3 as well). Seems like a storage file system level thing to > specify whether insert into is applied and implement it. > > Historically, there hasn't been any real difference between creating an > external table on HDFS vs creating a managed one. However, if we disallow > insert into on external tables, that would mean that folks with external > tables on HDFS wouldn't be able to make use of insert into functionality > even though they should be able to. Do we want to allow insert into on HDFS > tables regardless of whether they are external or not? > > Mark >
