ALTER TABLE RECOVER PARTITIONS vs. MSCK

Question

Are there any performance improvements to be gained from using MSCK in Hive over ALTER TABLE RECOVER PARTITIONS natively in ODAS?

Answer

ALTER TABLE <DB.TB>  RECOVER PARTITIONS is effectively an alias for the msck repair table statement. 

The primary difference in usability is that `alter table recover partitions` works from dbcli or directly ODAS through the REST API. The `msck repair table` command must be run from Hive. Hive then translates the `msck` call to `Alter table add partition` and distributes it to the planner as a call to each partition.

The overhead of this translation and distribution results in slower performance from Hive vs. natively through ODAS.

For more information, refer to the documentation here.