[HIVE-3672] Support altering partition column type in Hive

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.11.0
• Component/s: CLI, SQL
• Labels: features
• Hadoop Flags: Reviewed
• Release Note: Allow hive to change partition column type. Partition column is always converted into string. So the type checking is rely on the conversion.
• Tags: alter partition column type
• Assignee: Jingwei Lu
• Reporter: Jingwei Lu
• Created: 05/Nov/12 22:49
• Updated: 16/May/13 21:10
• Resolved: 22/Feb/13 16:34

Description

Currently, Hive does not allow altering partition column types. As we've discouraged users from using non-string partition column types, this presents a problem for users who want to change there partition columns to be strings, they have to rename their table, create a new table, and copy all the data over.

To support this via the CLI, adding a command like ALTER TABLE <table_name> PARTITION COLUMN (<column_name> <new type>);