How To Create Tables In HIVE

Hive provides us data warehousing facilities on top of an existing Hadoop cluster. Along with that it provides an SQL like interface.

You can create table in two different ways.

1. Create External table 

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE students
(id INT, name STRING, batch STRING)
ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t' #supply delimiter
LOCATION '/user/hdfs/students'; 

For External Tables Hive does not move the data into its warehouse directory. If the external table is dropped, then the table metadata is deleted but not the data.

2. Create Normal Table 

CREATE TABLE students
(id INT, name STRING, batch STRING)
ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t' #supply delimiter
LOCATION '/user/hddfs/students';

For Normal tables hive moves data into its warehouse directory. If the table is dropped, then the table metadata and the data will be deleted.