Change in serdeproperties does not update existing partitions

[Maxime Brugidou]

Hello,

I am using Hive 0.7 from cloudera cdh3u0 and I encounter a strange behavior
when I update the serdeproperties of a table (for example for the
RegexSerDe).

If you have a simple partitioned table like

create external table test_table (
    id int)
partitioned by (day string)
row format serde 'org.apache.hadoop.contrib.serde2.RegexSerDe'
with serdeproperties (
    'input.regex' = '.* ([^ ]*)'
);

alter table test_table add partition (day='2011-09-01');

alter table test_table set serdeproperties  (
    'input.regex' = '(.*)'
);

alter table test_table add partition (day='2011-09-02');


The first partition will still use the older regex and the new one will use
the new regex. Is this intended behavior? Why?

Thanks for your help,
Maxime