setting compression on hive table

Question

I have a hive table based on avro schema. The table was created with the following query

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE datatbl PARTITIONED BY (date String, int time) ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.avro.AvroSerDe' WITH SERDEPROPERTIES ( 'avro.schema.url'='path to schema file on HDFS') STORED as INPUTFORMAT 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.io.avro.AvroContainerInputFormat' OUTPUTFORMAT 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.io.avro.AvroContainerOutputFormat' LOCATION '<path on hdfs>'

So far we have been inserting data into the table by setting the following properties

hive> set hive.exec.compress.output=true; hive> set avro.output.codec=snappy;

However, if someone forgets to set the above two properties the compression is not achieved. I was wondering if there is a way to enforce compression on table itself so that even if the above two properties are not set the data is always compressed?

Answer 1

Yes, you can set the properties in the table. Try the following:

 CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE datatbl PARTITIONED BY (date String, int time)  
 ROW FORMAT SERDE   'org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.avro.AvroSerDe'  
 WITH SERDEPROPERTIES (   'avro.schema.url'='path to schema file on
 HDFS')   STORED as INPUTFORMAT  
 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.io.avro.AvroContainerInputFormat'  
 OUTPUTFORMAT  
 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.io.avro.AvroContainerOutputFormat' LOCATION
 '<path on hdfs>'
 TBLPROPERTIES ( "orc.compress"="SNAPPY" );