Question

After adding a partition to an external table in Hive, how can I update/drop it?

Answer 1

You can update a Hive partition by, for example:

ALTER TABLE logs PARTITION(year = 2012, month = 12, day = 18) 
SET LOCATION 'hdfs://user/darcy/logs/2012/12/18';

This command does not move the old data, nor does it delete the old data. It simply sets the partition to the new location.

To drop a partition, you can do

ALTER TABLE logs DROP IF EXISTS PARTITION(year = 2012, month = 12, day = 18);