@Miguel Rodriguez The JSON you are using isn't valid, you need to remove the double quotes around the map column value. So your JSON would be: {"a":"a1","b":"b1","d":{"key1":"pair1","key2":"pair2"}} ... View more

@Bala Vignesh N V This is normal behaviour for EXTERNAL tables since Hive is not managing the underlying data. You can see in the metastore database that Hive keeps a mapping of the partition name to the location on HDFS. Your ALTER command will update this mapping and change the PART_NAME value. hive=> SELECT t."TBL_NAME", s."LOCATION", p."PART_NAME" FROM "SDS" s, "TBLS" t, "PARTITIONS" p WHERE t."TBL_ID"=p."TBL_ID" AND s."SD_ID"=p."SD_ID"; TBL_NAME | LOCATION | PART_NAME ----------+----------------------------------------------+----------- mytable | hdfs://my.example.com:8020/tmp/mytable/part=a | part=z mytable | hdfs://my.example.com:8020/tmp/mytable/part=b | part=b If you want to rename the partition name on HDFS and have it reflected in the data then you do the rename on HDFS and then DROP the partition in the external table and ADD the renamed one. ... View more

@Arjan Onwezen the hcatalog jsonSerde doesn't look like it uses the SERDEPROPERTIES mappings and only maps exact fieldnames to column names or JSON field names matching Hive internal column names, i.e _col0, _col1. I think the JsonSerde you are referring to is the rcongui Hive-JSON-Serde which should work as you've outlined. ... View more