[HCATALOG-560] HCatClient should support addition of new columns to a Table.

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 0.4.1
• Fix Version/s: 0.5, 0.4.1
• Component/s: client
• Assignee: Mithun Radhakrishnan
• Reporter: Mithun Radhakrishnan
• Created: 03/Dec/12 00:54
• Updated: 15/Feb/13 21:32
• Resolved: 07/Dec/12 01:56

Description

HCatClient currently doesn't support the modification of a Table schema to support new columns. (The equivalent of "ALTER TABLE ... ADD COLUMN(...)".)

This is required by systems that need to support evolving data-schemas. If one considers the simplified case of only appending columns to the end of a table's schema-definition, it should be easy to provide and implement the following API in terms of HMSClient::alter_table():

public void appendColumnsToTable(String db, String table, List<HCatFieldSchema> newColumns) throws HCatException;