External Table creation error/ permission denied

[#1]

Hi

I am getting permission issue while creating external table. I logged in as root.

hive> create external table users ( > user_id INT, > age INT, > gender STRING, > occupation STRING, > zip_code STRING > ) > ROW FORMAT DELIMITED > FIELDS TERMINATED BY '|' > STORED AS TEXTFILE > LOCATION '/myid/userinfo'; FAILED: Execution Error, return code 1 from org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.exec.DDLTask. MetaException(message:java.security.AccessControlException: Permission denied: user=root, access=WRITE, inode="/":hdfs:hdfs:drwxr-xr-x

[#2]

@Tech Guy

One option is to try first to sudo as hive (or any user that had hdfs privileges) and then launch hive and execute your DDL statement

$sudo su hive

$hive

... then your DDL.

The reason is that you still need some hdfs write privileges for hive metadata.

If the response addresses your problem, vote/accept as the best answer.

[#3 · Accepted solution]

@Tech Guy Please take a look at this post.

You are getting a "permission denied"-error because you are trying to access a folder using "root" user that is owned by the hdfs-user and the permissions do not allow write access from others. Change owners of / to root.

sudo su - hdfs then

hdfs dfs -chown -R root /

Or if you don't want to change the permissions, launch hive using hdfs use

sudo su - hdfs

then run hive. no more permission issue.

[#4]

Why does it require write permissions to create an external table? If we have huge read-only data which we want the various users to query without duplicating, what should we do?