How to delete/truncate tables from Hadoop-Hive?

Question

Please tell me how to delete table from hive and also tell from where i can get more information about hive queries.

score 31 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 01 '14 at 21:40

31

You can use drop command to delete meta data and actual data from HDFS.

And just to delete data and keep the table structure, use truncate command.

For further help regarding hive ql, check language manual of hive.

edited Jul 01 '14 at 21:40

harschware

answered Feb 28 '13 at 08:30

2

Hive version 0.11 will support `TRUNCATE`. The documentation link provided in this answer is also out of date. Use [this](https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/LanguageManual+DDL). – Jake Z Oct 09 '13 at 18:51

score 12 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 05 '16 at 06:56

12

To Truncate:

hive -e "TRUNCATE TABLE IF EXISTS $tablename"

To Drop:

hive -e "Drop TABLE IF EXISTS $tablename"

edited Oct 05 '16 at 06:56

Petter Friberg

answered Oct 05 '16 at 06:52

Anoop Velluva

16

truncate table doesn't support 'if exists' clause – fi11er Apr 14 '17 at 19:15

score 6 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 01 '13 at 11:23

6

Use the following to delete all the tables in a linux environment.

hive -e 'show tables' | xargs -I '{}' hive -e 'drop table {}'

answered Mar 01 '13 at 11:23

3 Answers3