Use case: There is lot of data in the locally managed table and we want to convert those table into external table because we are working on a use case where our spark and home grown application has trouble reading locally managed tables. Solution: alter table table_name SET TBLPROPERTIES('EXTERNAL'='TRUE'); Test: Locally managed table dropped hive> drop table sample_07; OK Time taken: 0.602 seconds Data deleted as it's locally managed table. hive> dfs -ls /apps/hive/warehouse/sample_07; ls: `/apps/hive/warehouse/sample_07': No such file or directory Command failed with exit code = 1 Query returned non-zero code: 1, cause: null Converting sample_07_test from locally managed to external to keep the data there after drop. hive> alter table sample_07_test SET TBLPROPERTIES('EXTERNAL'='TRUE'); OK Time taken: 0.463 seconds Table dropped after converting into external table. hive> drop table sample_07_test; OK Time taken: 0.552 seconds Data is still on HDFS hive> dfs -ls /apps/hive/warehouse/sample_07_test; Found 1 items -rwxrwxrwx 3 hive hdfs 46059 2016-02-10 03:24 /apps/hive/warehouse/sample_07_test/000000_0 hive> Table removed from HCatalog hive> select * from sample_07_test; FAILED: SemanticException [Error 10001]: Line 1:14 Table not found 'sample_07_test' hive> ... View more