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Accessing a Partitioned ORC — Vertica Forum

Accessing a Partitioned ORC

Hi,
this is my first time here, so sorry for any mistake.

 

I am running Vertica 7.2 and need to map some external tables based on ORC files which reside on a Hadoop (Hive) database. I'm using the ORC reader instead of the HCatalog because is much more fast.

 

I defined the external tables as described in the documentation (create external table ... as copy ... from '/<path>/*' ORC) and this works for all the "tables" that have multiple ORC files in the same folder.

 

I also have a "table" that is partitioned by a field and the result is that I see a bunch of (I guess, I'm not keen on Hive) unpredictable sub-folders (each containing a set of ORC files) based on that partitioning criteria. The issue here is that I cannot point Vertica to the "main" folder because it will give me an error saying that it finds a folder instead of a file, but at the same time I don't know how many "sub-folders" we have (supposing I want to create a different external table for each partition).

 

I cannot find so much documentation on these ORC files, did anybody faced this problem before?

 

Any help is appreciated
Stefano

Comments

  • You can read nested folders by specifying a "/*" for each sub-directory.

     

    create external table ... as copy ... from '/<path>/*/*' ORC

    Assuming you have a single partition column in Hive, the above syntax will read into all the sub-directories in the partition folder.

    Does this solve your problem ?

     

  • And if you have more than one layer of partitioning, add wildcard directories to the path.  For example, if you have two partition columns, use '/path/*/*/*'.  The number of wildcards should always be one more than the number of levels of partitioning in the directory tree.

     

  • Hi Deepak and Monica,
    thank you very much for your solutions! You both explained really well how it works.

    I'm going to try it immediatly.

    Best regards
    Stefano

     

     

     

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