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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-19253?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=16582828#comment-16582828
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Alan Gates commented on HIVE-19253:
-----------------------------------
The first question that comes to mind is why are there two ways to specify
something as external? That's broken.
So in master I would simply ignore the external property everywhere and only
use tableType. We can mark it as a backward incompatible change. We could
also have the upgrade scripts look for any table with a property EXTERNAL and
have it set the table type to external.
In 3, I would make sure that all new tables that are specified external become
external (your item 1 above) but I wouldn't change the behavior of existing
tables (that is, I wouldn't do 2 above).
The other question I have is how many people out there think they've created an
external table when in fact they have not?
> HMS ignores tableType property for external tables
> --------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: HIVE-19253
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-19253
> Project: Hive
> Issue Type: Bug
> Components: Metastore
> Affects Versions: 3.0.0, 3.1.0, 4.0.0
> Reporter: Alexander Kolbasov
> Assignee: Alexander Kolbasov
> Priority: Major
> Labels: newbie
> Attachments: HIVE-19253.01.patch, HIVE-19253.02.patch,
> HIVE-19253.03.patch, HIVE-19253.03.patch, HIVE-19253.04.patch,
> HIVE-19253.05.patch
>
>
> When someone creates a table using Thrift API they may think that setting
> tableType to {{EXTERNAL_TABLE}} creates an external table. And boom - their
> table is gone later because HMS will silently change it to managed table.
> here is the offending code:
> {code:java}
> private MTable convertToMTable(Table tbl) throws InvalidObjectException,
> MetaException {
> ...
> // If the table has property EXTERNAL set, update table type
> // accordingly
> String tableType = tbl.getTableType();
> boolean isExternal =
> Boolean.parseBoolean(tbl.getParameters().get("EXTERNAL"));
> if (TableType.MANAGED_TABLE.toString().equals(tableType)) {
> if (isExternal) {
> tableType = TableType.EXTERNAL_TABLE.toString();
> }
> }
> if (TableType.EXTERNAL_TABLE.toString().equals(tableType)) {
> if (!isExternal) { // Here!
> tableType = TableType.MANAGED_TABLE.toString();
> }
> }
> {code}
> So if the EXTERNAL parameter is not set, table type is changed to managed
> even if it was external in the first place - which is wrong.
> More over, in other places code looks at the table property to decide table
> type and some places look at parameter. HMS should really make its mind which
> one to use.
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