It is an internal table. The creation process was using the HUE GUI to 'Create a new table manually' in the Metastore Manager for the Hive default database. I didn't choose the 'Create a new table from a file' option, which allows a user to specify if it should be an external table. I updated my reply to saranvisa's use cases, and the underlying HDFS files were deleted only if the HUE user who dropped the table was its creator. Fortunately, I do have access to HDFS superuser via the command line and was able to delete the table from my prior incident. Thanks for providing an alternative in the event that is not the case, especially since when deployed most users won't have command line access let alone HDFS superuser. Sounds like the trade-off is ease of use vs. level of security.
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