[IMPALA-189] Altering a table with a NULL partition key through Impala results in unusable table.

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: Impala 0.6
• Fix Version/s: Impala 0.7
• Assignee: Lenni Kuff
• Reporter: Alexander Behm
• Created: 03/Apr/13 21:13
• Updated: 04/Apr/13 23:57
• Resolved: 04/Apr/13 23:27

Description

Impala allows the following alter:
alter table functional.alltypes drop partition (year=NULL, month=1);

However, after the ALTER the table alltypes becomes unusable.
select count from functional.alltypes
Caused by: com.cloudera.impala.catalog.Db$TableLoadingException: Failed to load metadata for table: alltypes
at com.cloudera.impala.catalog.HdfsTable.load(HdfsTable.java:642)
at com.cloudera.impala.catalog.Table.load(Table.java:137)
at com.cloudera.impala.catalog.Db$LazyTableMap.loadTable(Db.java:227)
at com.cloudera.impala.catalog.Db$LazyTableMap.access$000(Db.java:110)
at com.cloudera.impala.catalog.Db$LazyTableMap$1.load(Db.java:119)
at com.cloudera.impala.catalog.Db$LazyTableMap$1.load(Db.java:116)

Similarly, we cannot fix the corrupt table metadata:
alter table functional.alltypes drop partition (year=NULL, month=1);
Same exception as above.