From my understanding of external tables they are great if we need multiple schemas associated with the same base data. A place where this could come handy is if we using custom SerDe implementation. The drawback that I have noticed has to do with binary file formats. One will have to use a custom map reduce job to generate the base data if you plan to use that as an external table. Please feel free to correct me here if I am wrong.
Thanks, Ranjith ________________________________ From: Shantian Purkad <[email protected]> To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Sent: Tue Apr 26 11:18:46 2011 Subject: External tables pros & cons Hi, What is the difference between external table and managed tables (apart from data being stored outside hive warehouse and not deleted when table is dropped) Are there any drawbacks of external tables? Or lack of support for certain features (such as indexes, joins, subqueries etc etc )? When and why should one not use external tables? Thanks and Regards, Shantian
