[HIVE-8371] HCatStorer should fail by default when publishing to an existing partition

• Type: Bug
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 0.13.0, 0.13.1, 0.14.0
• Component/s: HCatalog
• Labels: hcatalog partition
• Assignee: Thiruvel Thirumoolan
• Reporter: Thiruvel Thirumoolan
• Created: 06/Oct/14 23:49
• Updated: 08/Oct/14 03:24

Description

In Hive-12 and before (on in previous HCatalog releases) HCatStorer would fail if the partition already exists (whether before launching the job or during commit depending on the partitioning). HIVE-6406 changed that behavior and by default does an append. This causes data quality issues since an rerun (or duplicate run) won't fail (when it used to) and will just append to the partition.

A preferable approach would be to leave HCatStorer behavior as is (fail during a duplicate publish) and support append through an option. Overwrite also can be implemented in a similar fashion. Eg:

store A into 'db.table' using org.apache.hive.hcatalog.pig.HCatStorer('partspec', '', ' -append');