I think you can do this by 'alter table <> add properties ('EXTERNAL' ='TRUE')'
or some such. Basically Hive knows that a table is an EXTERNAL table by
checking for a table propery named 'EXTERNAL' and if you add this property
manually then it should be possible to make it an external table.
I have not tried this so do it at your own risk :)
Prasad
________________________________
From: Zheng Shao <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:11:32 -0800
To: <[email protected]>, Prasad Chakka <[email protected]>, Paul
Yang <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Question on modifying a table to become external
There is no command to do that right now.
One way to go is to create another external table pointing to the same
location (and forget about the old table).
Or you can move the files first, before dropping and recreating the same table.
Zheng
On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 10:22 AM, Eva Tse <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> We created a table without the 'EXTERNAL' qualifier but did specify a
> location for the warehouse. We would like to modify this to be an external
> table. We tried to drop the table, but it does delete the files in the S3
> external location.
>
> Is there a way we could achieve this?
>
> Thanks,
> Eva.
>
> CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS exampletable
> (
> other_properties Map<string, string>,
> event_ts_ms bigint,
> hostname string
> )
> PARTITIONED by (dateint int, hour int)
> ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\001' COLLECTION ITEMS TERMINATED
> BY '\004' MAP KEYS TERMINATED BY '\002' stored as SEQUENCEFILE
> LOCATION ' s3n://bucketname/hive/warehouse/exampletable';
--
Yours,
Zheng
