Truncating tables

In this recipe, you will learn how to truncate a table in Hive.

Getting ready

The TRUNCATE command removes all rows from the table as well as from the partition, but keeps the table structure as it is. Truncating a table in Hive is indirectly removing the files from the HDFS as a table in Hive is just a way of reading the data from the HDFS in the table or structural format. The general format of using the Truncate table command is as follows:

TRUNCATE TABLE table_name [PARTITION partition_spec];

Where:

partition_spec:

(partition_column = partition_col_value, partition_column = partition_col_value, ...)

How to do it…

Follow these steps to truncate a table in Hive:

The preceding command truncates the table named Sales:

Truncate table Sales;