This was fixed in Hive 8 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-2171). Can you just apply that patch?
On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 2:15 PM, Stephen R. Scaffidi < sscaff...@tripadvisor.com> wrote: > My team and I have been trying, with limited success, to use the COMMENT > feature of hive columns to maintain documentation for the tables and > columns in our data-warehouse built on hive. However, we use a number of > custom and non-native SerDes, and what happens to those tables is that the > comments always get overwritten with the string "from deserializer". > > I've possibly found a way to work around this from within hive but I want > to get some insight from the hive-dev community to figure out whether or > not this is a patently bad idea and we are just setting ourselves up for > pain later on. > > I won't go into all the details but it seems to work in our (so far) > limited testing. However, we are using hive 0.7.1 and the patch I am > sending is against master/HEAD. > > Please let me know if this is an acceptable approach to preserving column > comments with non-native SerDes or not! > > >
