Cloudera Docs

Locating Hive tables and changing the location

You need to know where Hive stores tables on HDFS and how to change the warehouse location after installing the service.

New tables that you create in CDP are stored in either the Hive warehouse for managed tables or the Hive warehouse for external tables. The following default warehouse locations are in the HDFS file system:
  • /warehouse/tablespace/managed/hive
  • /warehouse/tablespace/external/hive

Managed tables reside in the managed tablespace, which only Hive can access. By default, Hive assumes external tables reside in the external tablespace.

To determine the managed or external table type, you can run the DESCRIBE EXTENDED table_name command.

You need to set HDFS policies to access external tables in Ranger, or set up HDFS ACLs.

The capability to change the location of the Hive warehouse is intended for use immediately after installing the service. You can change the location of the warehouse using the Hive Metastore Action menu in Cloudera Manager as described in the following steps:
  1. In Cloudera Manager, click Clusters > Hive > Action Menu > Create Hive Warehouse Directory.
  2. In Cloudera Manager, click Clusters > Hive (the Hive Metastore service) > Configuration, and change the hive.metastore.warehouse.dir property value to the path for the new Hive warehouse directory.
  3. Click Hive > Hive > Action Menu > Create Hive Warehouse External Directory.
  4. Change the hive.metastore.warehouse.external.dir property value to the path for the Hive warehouse external directory.
  5. Configure Ranger policies or set up ACL permissions to access the directories.