How to check if a table exists in Hive?

Question

I am connecting to Hive via an ODBC driver from a .NET application. Is there a query to determine if a table already exists?

For example, in MSSQL you can query the INFORMATION_SCHEMA table and in Netezza you can query the _v_table table.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Answer 1

When programming on Hive by Spark SQL, you can use following method to check whether Hive table exists.

if (hiveContext.hql("SHOW TABLES LIKE '" + tableName + "'").count() == 1) {
    println(tableName + " exists")
}