@Raj Sivanesan Here's what I did in a lab environment. I wound up with over 20k partitions on a table (d'oh) and was ok with blowing out the table/database. I can't confirm that this should be done on a production cluster - use with caution. Feedback is welcome. Backup Hive Metastore: mysqldump -u root -p hivedb >> hivedb.bak Hive Metastore: --SELECT TBL_ID FROM TBLS WHERE TBL_NAME = 'myTable'; DELETE FROM PARTITION_KEY_VALS WHERE PART_ID IN (SELECT PART_ID FROM PARTITIONS WHERE TBL_ID = 54); DELETE FROM PARTITION_PARAMS WHERE PART_ID IN (SELECT PART_ID FROM PARTITIONS WHERE TBL_ID = 54); DELETE FROM PARTITIONS WHERE TBL_ID = 54; Hive: DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS myDatabase CASCADE; ... View more