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How to add a field to a complex type in Alter Table

avatar
New Contributor

Hi All,

 

I have created an external table from an existing parquet file:

 

+---------+------------------+-----------------------------+

| name    | type             | comment                     |

+---------+------------------+-----------------------------+

| name    | string           | Inferred from Parquet file. |

| address | struct<          | Inferred from Parquet file. |

|         |   street:string, |                             |

|         |   city:string    |                             |

|         | >                |                             |

+---------+------------------+-----------------------------+

 

Then I was trying to learn how schema evolution works and I created a new parquet file with a slightly different schema. New file now has an extra field in address called 'house_no'. Now if I executed a query involving address field, I woud get an error:

 

Query: select address.house_no, address.street, address.city from existing_parquet

ERROR: AnalysisException: Could not resolve column/field reference: 'address.house_no'

 

Then I was trying to alter the table to accomadate the new field in address, but I coudn't figure out a way to do that. For instance, if I executed something like:

 

ALTER TABLE existing_parquet ADD COLUMNS (address.house_no INTEGER);

 

I'd get a syntax error:

 

ERROR: AnalysisException: Syntax error in line 1:

...rquet ADD COLUMNS (address.house_no INTEGER)

                             ^

Encountered: .

Expected: ARRAY, BIGINT, BINARY, BOOLEAN, CHAR, DATE, DATETIME, DECIMAL, REAL, FLOAT, INTEGER, MAP, SMALLINT, STRING, STRUCT, TIMESTAMP, TINYINT, VARCHAR

 

CAUSED BY: Exception: Syntax error

 

So my question is is it possible to add a field to a complex type? If so how do I refer to the nested columns?

 

Thanks

Lloyd

 

3 REPLIES 3

avatar

Hi Lloyd,

 

you need to alter the type of the top-level column, i.e.,:

 

ALTER TABLE existing_parquet

CHANGE COLUMN address address STRUCT<:street:STRING,city:STRING,house_no INTEGER>

 

Unfortunately, there currently is no other way to make alterations to nested fields.

 

Alex

avatar
Explorer

You need to change nested field using hive. Here are my steps:

1. change top-level column type from hive. It supports complex types in 'alter table x change column y y struct<xyz>'

2. from impala shell run 'refresh *table_name*'

 

@alex.behm is there a ticket in jira for changing top-level columns of complex types? The alter command fails with 'invalid type' error message. Here is an example that works in hive but fails in impala:

alter table A change column B B struct<C: string, NEW_D: string>;

avatar

Indeed there is, and the issue has been fixed! See:

https://issues.cloudera.org/browse/IMPALA-2974

 

You can work around that specific problem in Impala by using the following syntax.

 

ALTER TABLE A REPLACE COLUMNS (complete list of column definitions)

 

My apologies for the inconvenience.