Updating the bucketted Hive table

[#1]

I have a external table which is created with partitions and buckets(256). Now if have to reduce the no of partitions. As it is an external table I have drop and recreate without affecting the data. Now the underlying HDFS location will have 256 files created under each partition. Is there any way that I change the 256 files equal to no of buckets which I have used in the new DDL? I know I can achieve this by re-processing the data again. But just wanted to know If I can achieve this by enabling any property?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

That's not possible w/o rewriting data.