Hi Vidhya This bug was reported and fixed in a later version of hive , Hive 0.8. An upgrade would set things in place.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-2888 Regards, Bejoy KS ________________________________ From: Vidhya Venkataraman <vid...@dropbox.com> To: user@hive.apache.org Sent: Friday, July 27, 2012 10:21 PM Subject: Create external table like. Hi I am using Hive 0.7.x on my dev machine (yeah we will be upgrading soon :) ) I used the statement indicated in the subject to create an external table: create external table ext_sample_v1 like sample_v1 location '/hive/warehouse/sample_v1/'; Since sample_v1 had partitions, I added some of them to ext_sample_v1 as well: alter table ext_sample_v1 add partition (dt='8/1/2012'); Select * on ext_sample_v1 yields the correct result. One odd thing is: hive > describe extended ext_sample_v1; OKkey_indexint useridbigint otheridbigint dtstring Detailed Table InformationTable(tableName:ext_sample_v1, dbName:default, owner:vidhya, createTime:1343406972, lastAccessTime:0, retention:0, sd:StorageDescriptor(cols:[FieldSchema(name:key_index, type:int, comment:null), FieldSchema(name:userid, type:bigint, comment:null), FieldSchema(name:otherid, type:bigint, comment:null), FieldSchema(name:dt, type:string, comment:null)], location:hdfs://localhost:9000/hive/warehouse/sample_v1, inputFormat:org.apache.hadoop.mapred.SequenceFileInputFormat, outputFormat:org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.io.HiveSequenceFileOutputFormat, compressed:false, numBuckets:-1, serdeInfo:SerDeInfo(name:null, serializationLib:org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.lazy.LazySimpleSerDe, parameters:{serialization.format=1}), bucketCols:[], sortCols:[], parameters:{}), partitionKeys:[FieldSchema(name:dt, type:string, comment:null)], parameters:{last_modified_by=vidhya, external=true, last_modified_time=1343407191, transient_lastDdlTime=1343407191}, viewOriginalText:null, viewExpandedText:null, tableType:MANAGED_TABLE) Notice the MANAGED_TABLE value! So, it doesn't treat this table as an external table. In fact when I drop ext_sample_v1, it also deletes the data associated with it. I didn't look into Hive source, but is this expected? Is this corrected in a future version? V
