update/dropping external table in Hive

Question

I'm working on Hive (tables) and I have some problem with updating and dropping external table. I created 2 external tables : T1 and T2 with same attributes

create external table T1(
nom string,
prenom string,
age int);

With query :

insert overwrite table T2( 
select
nom,
prenom,
age from T1;

I can update T2 with data in T1, but doing :

drop table T2;

and then recreating it create external table T2..... I get automatically all present in T2 before dropping, while I would to have an empty table. Is it "normal". Anybody could explain to me, why? and/or recommandate some method?

thx.

Answer 1

Dropping the table would not have removed the data present in the HDFS. The files will be available in the folder

/user/hive/warehouse/dbname.db/tablename

Try creating the table second time by removing the data from HDFS or with some other location specified in the create query itself.