Issue in renaming the table

[Rajasaiharish]

We have tried to rename a table

Ex: alter rename tablea to tableb

while we checked the table b properties we are seeing the tableb location is being pointed to tablea location.

[Khaja_Zaffer]

Hello @Rajasaiharish 

Thats expected behaviour 

so if you run DESCRIBE EXTENDED tableb; you might see that it could point the same location as tablea. 

we are just renaming not changing the location right?

[Rajasaiharish]

In general in CDP environment,we just rename the table and underlying location also gets changed 

[K_Anudeep]

Hi @Rajasaiharish !
Yes, that's correct! In hive/CDP (HMS word) rename operation (ALTER TABLE RENAME) automatically renames the directory in HDFS to match because Hive Metastore directly controls both the metadata and the storage path.

But in Databricks, UC separates logical metadata (catalogue/schema/table) from physical storage.

[szymon_dybczak · Accepted solution]

Hi @Rajasaiharish ,

Just like @Khaja_Zaffer  correctly suggested - renaming table doesn't change its location. If you want to change location as well use following command:

ALTER TABLE table_name SET LOCATION path_to_the_new_location

[K_Anudeep · Accepted solution]

Hello @Rajasaiharish ,

The above is expected by design.ALTER TABLE RENAME TO updates only the table name in the catalog.The underlying Delta log + data files remain in the original storage location

Try setting the location to a new location 

ALTER TABLE table_name SET LOCATION path_to_the_new_location

 or drop and recreate or run a CRTAS as a solution

[Rajasaiharish]

So after step alter table a to table b we need to run alter table table name set location ? And we did not faced this in our cdp environment