From 01c7c6b884244ac1a57e332c3aea669488ad9dc0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: c-sahuja <sahuja@cloudera.com> Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2016 19:03:23 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] Update Spark documentation to provide information on how to create External Table ## What changes were proposed in this pull request? Although, currently, the saveAsTable does not provide an API to save the table as an external table from a DataFrame, we can achieve this functionality by using options on DataFrameWriter where the key for the map is the String: "path" and the value is another String which is the location of the external table itself. This can be provided before the call to saveAsTable is performed. ## How was this patch tested? Documentation was reviewed for formatting and content after the push was performed on the branch.  Author: c-sahuja <sahuja@cloudera.com> Closes #16185 from c-sahuja/createExternalTable. --- docs/sql-programming-guide.md | 5 +++++ 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+) diff --git a/docs/sql-programming-guide.md b/docs/sql-programming-guide.md index e59c327915..6287e2be95 100644 --- a/docs/sql-programming-guide.md +++ b/docs/sql-programming-guide.md @@ -526,6 +526,11 @@ By default `saveAsTable` will create a "managed table", meaning that the locatio be controlled by the metastore. Managed tables will also have their data deleted automatically when a table is dropped. +Currently, `saveAsTable` does not expose an API supporting the creation of an "External table" from a `DataFrame`, +however, this functionality can be achieved by providing a `path` option to the `DataFrameWriter` with `path` as the key +and location of the external table as its value (String) when saving the table with `saveAsTable`. When an External table +is dropped only its metadata is removed. + ## Parquet Files [Parquet](http://parquet.io) is a columnar format that is supported by many other data processing systems. -- GitLab