[HIVE-7971] Support alter table change/replace/add columns for existing partitions

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.14.0
• Assignee: Jason Dere
• Reporter: Jason Dere
• Created: 03/Sep/14 23:53
• Updated: 13/Jan/15 09:23
• Resolved: 29/Sep/14 18:20

Description

ALTER TABLE CHANGE COLUMN is allowed for tables, but not for partitions. Same for add/replace columns.
Allowing this for partitions can be useful in some cases. For example, one user has tables with Hive 0.12 Decimal columns, which do not specify precision/scale. To be able to properly read the decimal values from the existing partitions, the column types in the partitions need to be changed to decimal types with precision/scale.

Issue Links

• is related to: HIVE-8411 Support partial partition spec for certain ALTER PARTITION statements
• links to: https://reviews.apache.org/r/25320/