Trying to understand how Hive decide whether a table is external

[Tao Wu]

Hi All,

It checks whether the parameters of a table contain an "EXTERNAL" key with
value "TRUE", instead of using the TableType field from the Table object.
Could you please share some insight?

The source code is shown below.

Thank you.
Tao

public static boolean isExternalTable(Table table) {
  if (table == null) {
    return false;
  }
  Map<String, String> params = table.getParameters();
  if (params == null) {
    return false;
  }

  return "TRUE".equalsIgnoreCase(params.get("EXTERNAL"));
}