[HIVE-1428] ALTER TABLE ADD PARTITION fails with a remote Thrift metastore

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 0.5.0
• Fix Version/s: 0.6.0
• Component/s: Metastore
• Hadoop Flags: Reviewed
• Assignee: Pradeep Kamath
• Reporter: Paul Yang
• Created: 23/Jun/10 01:02
• Updated: 17/Dec/11 00:03
• Resolved: 14/Aug/10 01:06

Description

If the hive cli is configured to use a remote metastore, ALTER TABLE ... ADD PARTITION commands will fail with an error similar to the following:

[pradeepk@chargesize:~/dev/howl]hive --auxpath ult-serde.jar -e "ALTER TABLE mytable add partition(datestamp = '20091101', srcid = '10',action) location '/user/pradeepk/mytable/20091101/10';"
10/06/16 17:08:59 WARN conf.Configuration: DEPRECATED: hadoop-site.xml found in the classpath. Usage of hadoop-site.xml is deprecated. Instead use core-site.xml, mapred-site.xml and hdfs-site.xml to override properties of core-default.xml, mapred-default.xml and hdfs-default.xml respectively
Hive history file=/tmp/pradeepk/hive_job_log_pradeepk_201006161709_1934304805.txt
FAILED: Error in metadata: org.apache.thrift.TApplicationException: get_partition failed: unknown result
FAILED: Execution Error, return code 1 from org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.exec.DDLTask
[pradeepk@chargesize:~/dev/howl]

This is due to a check that tries to retrieve the partition to see if it exists. If it does not, an attempt is made to pass a null value from the metastore. Since thrift does not support null return values, an exception is thrown.