Creation of a partitioned external table with hive: no data available

Question

I have the following file on HDFS:

I create the structure of the external table in Hive:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE google_analytics(
  `session` INT)
PARTITIONED BY (date_string string)
ROW FORMAT DELIMITED
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
LOCATION '/flumania/google_analytics';

ALTER TABLE google_analytics ADD PARTITION (date_string = '2016-09-06') LOCATION '/flumania/google_analytics';

After that, the table structure is created in Hive but I cannot see any data:

Since it's an external table, data insertion should be done automatically, right?

Answer 1

I think the problem was with the alter table command. The code below solved my problem:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE google_analytics(
  `session` INT)
PARTITIONED BY (date_string string)
ROW FORMAT DELIMITED
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
LOCATION '/flumania/google_analytics/';

ALTER TABLE google_analytics ADD PARTITION (date_string = '2016-09-06');

After these two steps, if you have a date_string=2016-09-06 subfolder with a csv file corresponding to the structure of the table, data will be automatically loaded and you can already use select queries to see the data.

Solved!