Can you change yarn.resource.memory-mb without root permission?

[#1]

yarn-default.xml says that I'm not the owner, so I can't change the permissions. I want to change yarn.resource.memory-mb from 8GB to 12GB, but when I try and save the changes it says I don't have the permissions necessary to save the file. Is there any way to work around this?

I'm trying to run the CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE command from the Tutorial Exercise 2 on Cloudera Live. Hive gets stuck on that query and I thought that this might be the problem.

[#2]

A CREATE TABLE statement will not start a YARN job, so allocating more memory for YARN is unlikely to fix this. What happens when you run the statement? Is there anything in the logs that give a clue what's happening?

Regards,
Jim