Hi Predrag, We are using MultiDelimitSerDe that as far as i understand is built on top of LazySimpleSerDe it looks like the serialization.encoding param does not have any effect. File encoding is: ISO-8859 text what ever encoding i place into SERDEPROPERTIES does not have any effect...do you know maybe what might be the issue? we are using hortonworks hdp 2.5.0.0 and the table ddl is as follows: CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE IF NOT EXISTS INVOICES_1 ( list of columns) PARTITIONED BY ( columns) ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.contrib.serde2.MultiDelimitSerDe' WITH SERDEPROPERTIES ( "field.delim"="||", "serialization.encoding"="ISO8859_1") LOCATION 'file/location' tblproperties("skip.header.line.count"="1"); Regards, dalibor ... View more