Is it possible to change the metadata of a column that is on a partitioned table in Hive?

Question

This is an extension of a previous question I asked: Is it possible to change partition metadata in HIVE?

We are exploring the idea of changing the metadata on the table

Answer 1

You can easily change column type:

Use alter table in Hive, change type to STRING, etc:

alter table table_name change column col_name col_name string cascade; --change to string

See documentation.

ALTER TABLE CHANGE COLUMN with CASCADE command changes the columns of a table's metadata, and cascades the same change to all the partition metadata.

Alternatively you can recreate table like in this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/58299056/2700344