hive

DESCRIBE FORMATTED my_table; or DESCRIBE FORMATTED my_table PARTITION (my_column=’my_value’);

According to the LanguageManual, you can use unix_timestamp() to get the “current time stamp using the default time zone.” If you need to convert that to something more human-readable, you can use from_unixtime(unix_timestamp()).

You can update a Hive partition by, for example: ALTER TABLE logs PARTITION(year = 2012, month = 12, day = 18) SET LOCATION ‘hdfs://user/darcy/logs/2012/12/18’; This command does not move the old data, nor does it delete the old data. It simply sets the partition to the new location. To drop a partition, you can do … Read more

You need to use the special hiveconf for variable substitution. e.g. hive> set CURRENT_DATE=’2012-09-16′; hive> select * from foo where day >= ${hiveconf:CURRENT_DATE} similarly, you could pass on command line: % hive -hiveconf CURRENT_DATE=’2012-09-16′ -f test.hql Note that there are env and system variables as well, so you can reference ${env:USER} for example. To see … Read more