[HIVE-6475] Implement support for appending to mutable tables in HCatalog

• Type: Sub-task
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.13.0
• Component/s: HCatalog, Metastore, Query Processor, Thrift API

Release Note

Introduces append feature for HCatalog writes.

Previously, if an unpartitioned table had data in it, or if a partition in a partitioned table had data in it, or if the partition even existed, HCat would fail if a user attempted to write to them. Now, that behaviour is extended so that the strict behaviour exists only if the table in question has a parameter "immutable" set to "true" (see HIVE-6406).

With this patch, we can append to existing partitions or non-partitioned tables that already have data in them, as long as the new data being written is compatible to the old data (i.e. one cannot mix fileformats when attempting an append)

As a further note, append is currently not compatible with dynamic partitioning, and a dynamic partitioning job is still unable to append to a table, even if it is a mutable table.

• Assignee: Sushanth Sowmyan
• Reporter: Sushanth Sowmyan
• Created: 20/Feb/14 19:30
• Updated: 07/Jul/14 04:29
• Resolved: 28/Feb/14 23:05

Description

Part of HIVE-6405, this is the implementation of the append feature on the HCatalog side. If a table is mutable, we must support being able to append to existing data instead of erroring out as a duplicate publish.