How to Update/Drop a Hive Partition?
Solution 1:
You can update a Hive partition by, for example:
ALTER TABLE logs PARTITION(year = 2012, month = 12, day = 18)
SET LOCATION 'hdfs://user/darcy/logs/2012/12/18';
This command does not move the old data, nor does it delete the old data. It simply sets the partition to the new location.
To drop a partition, you can do
ALTER TABLE logs DROP IF EXISTS PARTITION(year = 2012, month = 12, day = 18);
Hope it helps!
Solution 2:
in addition, you can drop multiple partitions from one statement (Dropping multiple partitions in Impala/Hive).
Extract from above link:
hive> alter table t drop if exists partition (p=1),partition (p=2),partition(p=3);
Dropped the partition p=1
Dropped the partition p=2
Dropped the partition p=3
OK
EDIT 1:
Also, you can drop bulk using a condition sign (>,<,<>), for example:
Alter table t
drop partition (PART_COL>1);
Solution 3:
Alter table table_name drop partition (partition_name);
Solution 4:
You can either copy files into the folder where external partition is located or use
INSERT OVERWRITE TABLE tablename1 PARTITION (partcol1=val1, partcol2=val2...)...
statement.
Solution 5:
You may also need to make database containing table active
use [dbname]
otherwise you may get error (even if you specify database i.e. dbname.table )
FAILED Execution Error, return code 1 from org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.exec.DDLTask. Unable to alter partition. Unable to alter partitions because table or database does not exist.