Is it possible to import data into Hive table without copying the data

Question

I have log files stored as text in HDFS. When I load the log files into a Hive table, all the files are copied.

Can I avoid having all my text data stored twice?

Answer 1

You can use alter table partition statement to avoid data duplication.

create External table if not exists TestTable (testcol string) PARTITIONED BY (year INT,month INT,day INT) row format delimited fields terminated by ',';

ALTER table TestTable partition (year='2014',month='2',day='17') location 'hdfs://localhost:8020/data/2014/2/17/';