Could not reproduced that issue on Cloudera quickstart VM. I’ve created an HDFS directory with 10,000 files. I’ve create external table from within beeline. The creation was immediate.
Dudu ------------------------------------------------------------------- bash ------------------------------------------------------------------- mkdir files_10k awk 'BEGIN{for (i=1;i<=10000;++i){print i>"./files_10k/f"i".txt"}}' hdfs dfs -put files_10k /tmp ------------------------------------------------------------------- beeline ------------------------------------------------------------------- > create external table files_10k (i int) row format delimited fields > terminated by '\t' location '/tmp/files_10k'; No rows affected (0.282 seconds) > select * from files_10k; 10,000 rows selected (27.986 seconds) From: Margus Roo [mailto:mar...@roo.ee] Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2016 11:26 PM To: user@hive.apache.org Subject: Re: Create external table Hi again I opened hive (an old client) And exactly the same create external table .... location [paht in hdfs to place where are loads of files] works and the same DDL does not work via beeline. Margus (margusja) Roo http://margus.roo.ee skype: margusja +372 51 48 780 On 10/05/16 23:03, Margus Roo wrote: Hi Can someone explain or provide documentation how Hive creates external tables? I have problem with creating external table in case I am pointing location in hdfs in to directory where are loads of files. Beeline just hangs or there will be other errors. In case I point location in to the empty directory then hive creates table. So does hive looks into files during creating external table? I can not find any documentation explaining it. -- Margus (margusja) Roo http://margus.roo.ee skype: margusja +372 51 48 780