it is possible, I see people sqoop into manged table then alter table to be external, sqoop continues to work http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27991258/how-to-create-external-table-in-hive-using-sqoop-need-suggestions#29602510 Another option is to manually create table in hive as external and sqoop reference to that table, see section on incremental_table http://docs.hortonworks.com/HDPDocuments/HDP2/HDP-2.3.0/bk_dataintegration/content/incrementally-updating-hive-table-with-sqoop-and-ext-table.html For sqoop to create an external table outright, you might want to open an enhancement jira ... View more

Here is work around, which i have implemented. For an external table, If you are trying to drop a partition and as-well would like to delete the data. This can be achieved as below. 1. Alter external table as internal table -- by changing the TBL properties as external =false 2. Drop the partitions -- when you drop the partitions, data pertained to the partitions will also be dropped as now this table is managed table 3. Alter back the table as external=True. By doing this, there more controlled on what we are deleting and drop the partitions rather than using hadoop rm command ... View more

Hi @Praveen PentaReddy, 1. If you want to backup a data in archive location as a table, then create a table as original one create external table MYTABLE_archive like MYTABLE location '<hdfs_archive_location>'; 2. Copy the data from original table to archive one: 2.a. using HQL: INSERT INTO TABLE MYTABLE_archive partition(date) SELECT * from MYTABLE where date>= <start_date> and date<=<end_date>; -- dynamic partitioning should be enabled; 2.b. using file transfer: Identify location of each partition to be copied. Copy directories to the location of archive table and then add partitions: hdfs dfs -cp <orig_partitions_loc> <archive_table_location>/ # alternatively you can use distcp in case of huge volumes, but check if you have permissions to execute it. Also make sure you understand the difference between those two command in regards to file attributes. then add new partitions in archve: MSCK REPAIR TABLE MYTABLE_archive; ... View more