… And you may want to double check your table properties using: describe formatted <YourTableName>;
/Jerome From: Steven Wong <sw...@netflix.com<mailto:sw...@netflix.com>> Reply-To: <user@hive.apache.org<mailto:user@hive.apache.org>> Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:27:26 +0000 To: "user@hive.apache.org<mailto:user@hive.apache.org>" <user@hive.apache.org<mailto:user@hive.apache.org>> Subject: RE: dropping an "external" table without deleting the data 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<mailto: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
