How to delete data from an external table in Hive?

1 year ago
Jackson Davis
2 minutes

To delete data from an external Hive table, there are several methods available:

  1. Using the DELETE command in Hive:
  2. Remove all records from the external table named external_table_name.
  3. This will delete all data in the external table, but will not delete the table itself.
  4. Using Hadoop commands:
  5. If the external table is using a Hadoop file system (such as HDFS), you can delete data using Hadoop commands. For example, if the data for the external table is stored in the /path/to/data directory, you can use the following command to delete the data:
  6. Remove all data in the specified path using Hadoop.
  7. This will recursively delete all files and subdirectories within the specified directory.
  8. Delete the data file of the external table directly.
  9. If you know the location of the external table’s data file, you can directly delete these files. For example, if the data file is located at /path/to/data/file.csv, you can use the following command to delete the file:
  10. Delete the file.csv located at /path/to/data
  11. This will directly delete the data files, but will not delete the definitions of external tables.

Please note that deleting data does not remove the definition of the external table, it only removes the data files. If you need to fully delete the external table, you can use the DROP TABLE statement in Hive.

DROP TABLE external_table_name;

This will remove the definition of the external table and its associated metadata, including the table’s schema, partitions, etc.

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