question Impala-Shell vs Impala in Hue in Archives of Support Questions (Read Only)

Impala-Shell vs Impala in Hue

AlinaGHERMAN — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:57:20 GMT

Hello,

I need to use the TRUNCATE command, however

when I the folowing command

TRUNCATE TABLE table_name  PARTITION  (datebymonth='2014-10')

in impala-shell I get an error:

ERROR: AnalysisException: Syntax error in line 6:
  TRUNCATE TABLE user_events  ...
  ^
  Encountered: IDENTIFIER
  Expected: ALTER, COMPUTE, CREATE, DESCRIBE, DROP, EXPLAIN, GRANT, INSERT, INVALIDATE, LOAD, REFRESH, REVOKE, SELECT, SET, SHOW, USE, VALUES, WITH

In hue impala editor everything is fine.

Note: I need to use the impala-shell because I add these queries in a cron job.

The impala version that I use: v2.1.4-cdh5

Cloudera version: CDH 5.3

Thank you!

Re: Impala-Shell vs Impala in Hue

alex.behm — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 12:53:30 GMT

Impala currently does not support truncating an individual partition, so that syntax error you get from the shell is expected.

I am not sure why the statement appears to work from Hue. The TRUNCATE TABLE ... PARTITION syntax is not supported, so I don't see how this would work.

Perhaps the error is somehow not properly shown/propagated to Hue?

Re: Impala-Shell vs Impala in Hue

AlinaGHERMAN — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 14:01:04 GMT

Effectivly, TRUNCATE doesn't apear in

http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/documentation/cloudera-impala/latest/topics/impala_shell_commands.html

Re: Impala-Shell vs Impala in Hue

alex.behm — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 00:40:52 GMT

Thanks for the notice, it could be an oversight with the docs. I'll look into it.