Can not ALTER or DROP a big partitionned tables - CAUSED BY: MetaException: Timeout when executing..

[#1]

Hi,

I have a partitionned tables that have more than 50k partitions, it work a good except the Hive Metastore operations, like DROP and ALTER ... RENAME, I face this error message:

Query: drop table cars
ERROR: ImpalaRuntimeException: Error making 'dropTable' RPC to Hive Metastore: 
CAUSED BY: MetaException: Timeout when executing method: drop_table_with_environment_context; 600003ms exceeds 600000ms

I don't now if it's, a memory problem, or it's normal and I should adjust the timeout value.. ? if yes, which one ?

Thanks to help me ASAP.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

This is a known issue and we have an internal JIRA to track it. Current there is no better way to improve the performance.

You can, however, to increase the timeout limit via "hive.metastore.client.socket.timeout", and set it to long time value (in seconds) to allow the query to finish. It should finish eventually, but might take sometime.

Our engineers are still discussing internally to see the best fix for the issue, however, it is on going and we do not have solution yet at this stage.

[#3 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

The first one "Hive Metastore Connection Timeout" is the one you should try. If you look closely, "hive.metastore.client.socket.timeout" is just underneath it.

Regarding the JIRA ID, it is an internal JIRA, so you do not have access to it.

Another way is to setup a quick script to drop partition in batches and and then drop the table after number of partitions have reduced to a reasonable level.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Hi Vibin,

I can see that this issue is tracked under HIVE-6980 on the upstream JIRA. And I can confirm that it has been fixed in CDH6.1 and CDH5.16 onwards.

If you are using older version, you can try to increase the value for hive.metastore.client.socket.timeout as a workaround as mentioned in the previous post.

Hope above is helpful.

Cheers

Eric 

[#5]

Dear @EricL ,

Thank you for your help ! This helps.

Regards,

Vibin Chandran

[#6]

My pleasure!