According to the documentation the Hive table property "transactional" cannot be set to 'false' once you set it to 'true'. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/Hive+Transactions#HiveTransactions-TableProperties The solution I found is to re-create the table without that property. Before re-creating the table be aware that "DROP TABLE <table_name>" will erase both Hive metadata and HDFS data, so you have to back up your data first. ... View more