Hi, I have a Hive external table with a lot of partitions where the underlying data is in JSON. I use this popular serde <https://github.com/rcongiu/Hive-JSON-Serde> to read and write in JSON format.
So I have a data stream where sometimes there are changes to the JSON structure. For eg, a key might change its type from string to a struct or an array. Replacing/Changing the column via the ALTER statement does not really help since it results in a ClassCastException(Based on this ticket <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-4409>). My question is what would be the best way to deal with such schema changes without dropping/creating the table again. Basically i dont want to lose my partitions. I am currently using Hive version 0.13.1 but planning to move to version 1.2.1 soon. Any help/advise would be appreciated. Thanks, Udit
