You can change your table to external first and then drop it:
ALTER TABLE my_table SET TBLPROPERTIES ('EXTERNAL'='FALSE');
Please test it on an unimportant table first.
From: Igor Tatarinov [mailto:i...@decide.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2012 3:55 PM
To: user@hive.apache.org
Subject: dropping an "external" table without deleting the data
I keep making the same mistake of creating an external table without saying
"EXTERNAL". As a result, as you can imagine, I am stuck with a table that I
cannot drop or I'll lose the external (S3) data. I end up terminating my EMR
instance and creating a new one to avoid dropping the table accidentally.
Is there a way to drop a "should-be-external" table without losing the data?
Thru mysql perhaps?
Thanks!
igor
