[HIVE-2231] Column aliases

• Type: Wish
• Status: Open
• Priority: Trivial
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: Query Processor
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Adam Kramer
• Created: 21/Jun/11 18:27
• Updated: 26/Jul/11 23:02

Description

It would be nice in several cases to be able to alias column names.

Say someone in your company CREATEd a TABLE called important_but_named_poorly (alvin BIGINT, theodore BIGINT, simon STRING) PARTITIONED BY (dave STRING), that indexes the relationship between an actor (alvin), a target (theodore), and the interaction between them (simon), partitioned based on the date string (dave). Renaming the columns would break a million pipelines that are important but ownerless.

It would be awesome to define an aliasing system as such:

ALTER TABLE important_but_named_poorly REPLACE COLUMNS (actor BIGINT AKA alvin, target BIGINT AKA theodore, ixn STRING AKA simon) PARTITIONED BY (ds STRING AKA dave);

...which would mean that any user could, e.g., use the term "dave" to refer to ds if they really wanted to.