[HIVE-2758] Metastore is caching too aggressively

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.9.0
• Assignee: Kevin Wilfong
• Reporter: Kevin Wilfong
• Created: 27/Jan/12 18:43
• Updated: 31/Oct/14 12:28
• Resolved: 01/Feb/12 17:50

Description

The metastore is caching values, like table names and locations too aggressively, leading to inconsistencies across Hive clients and metastore Thrift servers.

For example, open two Hive clients, in each call
DESCRIBE FORMATTED table_foo;

Then in one of those clients, execute
ALTER TABLE table_foo RENAME TO table_bar;

Then in both clients call
DESCRIBE FORMATTED table_bar;

In the client that executed the alter command, the location is correct, however, in the other Hive client, it will still show the original location of table_foo.

A similar experiment can be done using metastore Thrift servers, substituting get_table for DESCRIBE FORMATTED and alter_table for ALTER TABLE ... RENAME TO.

On the Thrift server you can see that the one which did not execute the alter command, not only returns the wrong location, despite calling get_table('table_bar') it will return a table that still has the name table_foo.

Issue Links

• relates to: HIVE-8684 Metastore caching too aggresive for partition location change