In this section we describes how to drop a table in Hive. When you drop a table from Hive Metastore, it removes the table/column data and their metadata. It can be a normal table (stored in Metastore) or an external table (stored in local file system); Hive treats both in the same manner, irrespective of their types.
Drop Table Statement
The syntax is as follows:
DROP TABLE [IF EXISTS] table_name;
The following query drops a table named employee:
hive> DROP TABLE IF EXISTS employee;
On successful execution of the query, you get to see the following response:
OK Time taken: 5.3 seconds hive>
JDBC Program
The following JDBC program drops the employee table.
import java.sql.SQLException;
import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.ResultSet;
import java.sql.Statement;
import java.sql.DriverManager;
public class HiveDropTable {
private static String driverName = "org.apache.hadoop.hive.jdbc.HiveDriver";
public static void main(String[] args) throws SQLException {
// Register driver and create driver instance
Class.forName(driverName);
// get connection
Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:hive://localhost:10000/userdb", "", "");
// create statement
Statement stmt = con.createStatement();
// execute statement
stmt.executeQuery("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS employee;");
System.out.println("Drop table successful.");
con.close();
}
}
Save the program in a file named HiveDropTable.java. Use the following commands to compile and execute this program.
$ javac HiveDropTable.java $ java HiveDropTable
Output:
Drop table successful
The following query is used to verify the list of tables:
hive> SHOW TABLES; emp ok Time taken: 2.1 seconds hive>