Prasad, That¹s what we are looking for. We tried both: * alter table <table name> add [properties|property] (EXTERNAL¹ =¹TRUE¹) and it doesn¹t work. Could you give us the syntax where it would work?
Since it is not documented, we won¹t hold you responsible for it :) Zheng, Your solution works also, except we¹d rather delete that table or at least be able to rename it. Our external location is on S3; hence renaming is giving an error like: table new location hdfs://hive/eva_unittest/warehouse/eva is on a different file system than the old location s3n://bucketname/hive/eva_unittest/warehouse/non_external_tbl. This operation is not supported Thanks, Eva. On 2/18/10 12:13 PM, "Prasad Chakka" <[email protected]> wrote: > I think you can do this by alter table <> add properties (EXTERNAL¹ > =¹TRUE¹)¹ or some such. Basically Hive knows that a table is an EXTERNAL table > by checking for a table propery named EXTERNAL¹ 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 EXTERNAL¹ 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 > >
