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Drop external hive table with data

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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

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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.

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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.

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Expert Contributor

Awesome, works like a charm