How to get the partition column name of a Hive table

Question

I'm developing a unix script where I'll be dealing with Hive tables partitioned by either column A or column B. I'd like to find on what column a table is partition on so that I can do subsequent operations on those partition instances.

Is there any property in Hive which returns the partition column directly?

I'm thinking I'll have to do a show create table and extract the partition name somehow if there isn't any other way possible.

Answer 1

May be not the best, but one more approach is by using describe command

Create table:

create table employee ( id int, name string ) PARTITIONED BY (city string);

Command:

hive -e 'describe formatted employee'  | awk '/Partition/ {p=1}; p; /Detailed/ {p=0}'

Output:

# Partition Information
# col_name              data_type               comment

city                    string

you can improve it as per your need.

One more option which i dint explore is by querying meta-store repository tables to get the partition column information for a table.

Answer 2

Through scala/java api, we can get to the hive meta store and get the partition column names org.apache.hadoop.hive.metastore.HiveMetaStoreClient

val conf = new Configuration()
conf.set("hive.metastore.uris","thrift://hdppmgt02.domain.com:9083")
val hiveConf = new HiveConf(conf, classOf[HiveConf])
val metastoreClient = new HiveMetaStoreClient(hiveConf)

metastoreClient.getTable(db, tbl).getPartitionKeys.foreach(x=>println("Keys : "+x))