Only today I had the exact same issue. I used a script to load partitions but due to a mistake there were a lot of unwanted partitions with special characters. "Alter table drop partitions" showed successful but partitions where never removed.
Finally, this is what I did 1) hive> show create <table name>; copy the output of this to my editor, to use the same command to recreate tables. 2) Move the tables data from /user/hive/warehouse/<table> to another backup folder. 3) Drop table. 4) Create table- using the output of 1. 5) Use a shell script to reload all the partitions. On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 3:10 PM, Nitin Pawar <nitinpawar...@gmail.com> wrote: > you can try with like statement > On 21 Jul 2014 19:32, "fab wol" <darkwoll...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Hi everyone, >> >> I have the following problem: I have a partitoned managed table >> (Partition table is a string which represents a date, eg. >> log-date="2014-07-15"). Unfortunately there is one partition in there like >> this: log_date=2014-07-15-23%3A45%3A38 (copied from show partitions stmt). >> This partitions most likeley got created to a wrong script 8which is fixed). >> >> Now i want to delete this partition, but it doesn't work: >> >> - alter table ... drop partitition >> (log_date='2014-07-15-23%3A45%3A38') gives no error, but the partition is >> still existing afterwards >> - I tried escaping the %-signs with backslashes but no luck with that >> - I delete the directory in the HDFS and run msck repair table >> afterwards. It recognizes that the folder is missing but is not deleting >> the metadata >> >> So what can I do to get rid of the metadata? My next guess would be to go >> directly to the metastore DB and delete the metadata there. But what >> exactly has to be deleted? I guess there are several dependencies. >> >> Other idea: is there a possibility in Hive to delete a partition by a >> unique ID or something like that? >> >> Or what is needed to delete the table with the normal "alter table drop >> partition" command? >> >> Cheers >> Wolli >> >
