TRUNCATE TABLE on an external table

Hive 3 does not support TRUNCATE TABLE on external tables. Truncating an external table results in an error. You can truncate an external table if you change your applications to set a table property to purge data.

Before Upgrade to CDP

Some legacy versions of Hive supported TRUNCATE TABLE on external tables.

After Upgrade to CDP Private Cloud Base

By default, TRUNCATE TABLE is supported only on managed tables. Attempting to truncate an external table results in the following error:

Error: org.apache.spark.sql.AnalysisException: Operation not allowed: TRUNCATE TABLE on external tables

Action Required

Change applications. Do not attempt to run TRUNCATE TABLE on an external table.

Alternatively, change applications to alter a table property to set external.table.purge to true to allow truncation of an external table:

ALTER TABLE mytable SET TBLPROPERTIES ('external.table.purge'='true');