May be it's because of a diferente version (I'm using HDP and Hadoop 3) but this doesn't work as described here. In first place if you try to set a variable in the "hiveConf:" namespace you will get an error like this: Error while processing statement: Cannot modify hiveConf:test at runtime You have to use the "hivevar:" namespace for this like: :2> set hivevar:test=date_sub(current_date, 5); But more importante, Hive won't expand the variable value definition as shown here: :2> set hivevar:test; +-----------------------------------------+ | hivevar:test=date_sub(current_date, 5) | +-----------------------------------------+ So the INSERT will not interpreted as you stated but instead as: INSERT INTO TABLE am_temp2 PARTITION (search_date=date_sub(current_date, 5)) and this for some reason is not supported in Hive and gives a compilation error: FAILED: ParseException line 1:50 cannot recognize input near 'date_sub' '(' It would be very useful to insert data into static partitioning using pre-calculated variable values like this, from functions or select queries, but I still haven't found how to do this in HiveQL.   As a reference, this seems to be (at least partially) related with this: https://docs.cloudera.com/HDPDocuments/HDP3/HDP-3.1.0/hive-overview/content/hive_use_variables.html     ... View more