Determining the table type

You can determine the type of a Hive table, whether it has ACID properties, the storage format, such as ORC, and other information. Knowing the table type is important for a number of reasons, such as understanding how to store data in the table or to completely remove data from the cluster.

  1. In the Hive shell, get an extended description of the table.
    For example: DESCRIBE EXTENDED mydatabase.mytable;
  2. Scroll to the bottom of the command output to see the table type.
    The following output says the table type is managed. transaction=true indicates that the table has ACID properties:
    ...
    | Detailed Table Information  | Table(tableName:t2, dbName:mydatabase, owner:hdfs, createTime:1538152187, lastAccessTime:0, retention:0, sd:StorageDescriptor(cols:[FieldSchema(name:a, type:int, comment:null), FieldSchema(name:b, type:int, comment:null)], ...