Our Community is getting an upgrade! To get everything ready for the relaunch, we’ll be placing the site in read-only mode starting September 21st.
We really appreciate your understanding while we get things set up behind the scenes. Catch up on all the exciting details about the move here.
Need help or have questions? Drop us a line at [email protected]

Archives of Support Questions (Read Only)

This is an archived board for historical reference. Information and links may no longer be available or relevant
Announcements
This board is archived and read-only for historical reference. To ask a new question, please post a new topic on the appropriate active board.

Drop external hive table with data

avatar
Expert Contributor

I have a lot of external table in my hive warhouse and I would to drop all these tables with data automatically.

how can I do this?

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

avatar
Master Guru

@Yassine

Do alter table on all tables and change the external table to internal table then drop the table.

Example:-

Write a script which can execute below statement for all the tables that are in warehouse directory

hive> ALTER TABLE <table-name> SET TBLPROPERTIES('EXTERNAL'='False'); //changing the tbl properties to to make the table as internal
hive> drop table <table-name>; //now the table is internal if you drop the table data will be dropped automatically.

View solution in original post

2 REPLIES 2

avatar
Master Guru

@Yassine

Do alter table on all tables and change the external table to internal table then drop the table.

Example:-

Write a script which can execute below statement for all the tables that are in warehouse directory

hive> ALTER TABLE <table-name> SET TBLPROPERTIES('EXTERNAL'='False'); //changing the tbl properties to to make the table as internal
hive> drop table <table-name>; //now the table is internal if you drop the table data will be dropped automatically.

avatar
Expert Contributor

Awesome, works like a charm