Hive (internal) tables are meant to be fully managed by Hive for both data and metadata (schema). That's not true for external tables. External tables means Hive doesn't own the data per se, but only shares it as one of the applications. Since ACID will need to have complete control of the data, for example, it needs to manage the directory layout, perform compaction, clean up old files and so on, we want to avoid potential interference issues. I understand in your case you may only use the data for Hive only, but the fact that by design external tables can be used by anything else provides enough evidence that disabling ACID on them has to be enforced. As to your use case, you may want to solve the governance issues by creating difference roles or even better, use Ranger to make things easier: https://docs.hortonworks.com/HDPDocuments/HDP2/HDP-2.3.2/bk_Sys_Admin_Guides/content/ch_hive_auth.html ... View more