Hi, I have tested the same in my lab cluster, seems to be multi character delimiters will not works in impala.   Below is my testing when i tried with ',|'   Failing: Query: Create table test ( name string, place string ) ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',|' STORED AS TEXTFILE TBLPROPERTIES('serialization.null.format'='') ERROR: AnalysisException: ESCAPED BY values and LINE/FIELD terminators must be specified as a single character or as a decimal value in the range [-128:127]: ,|   Created: [host-1abc.cloudera.com:21000] default> Create table test ( name string, place string ) ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY '|'                                                   > STORED AS TEXTFILE                                                   > TBLPROPERTIES('serialization.null.format'=''); Query: Create table test ( name string, place string ) ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY '|' STORED AS TEXTFILE TBLPROPERTIES('serialization.null.format'='') +-------------------------+ | summary                 | +-------------------------+ | Table has been created. | +-------------------------+   Created: [host-1abc.cloudera.com:21000] default> Create table test1 ( name string, place string ) ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','                                                   > STORED AS TEXTFILE                                                   > TBLPROPERTIES('serialization.null.format'=''); Query: Create table test1 ( name string, place string ) ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' STORED AS TEXTFILE TBLPROPERTIES('serialization.null.format'='') +-------------------------+ | summary                 | +-------------------------+ | Table has been created. | +-------------------------+ ... View more

When querying a parquet hive table in impala, be sure to run:   invalidate metadata <table name>;   After this you should see the results. ... View more