On Mon, Mar 27, 2023 at 2:16 PM Keith Turner <ke...@deenlo.com> wrote:
> One realization that came out examining the different table states is > that export table currently relies on the fact that offline tables > will not delete files. If we enable compactions on offline tables > then that could cause files to be deleted which would break the > expectation of export table. > This is a good point. I hadn't considered the potential breakage to export table. I suspect another concern could be the hadoop input format that operates over the rfiles in an offline table - and can do so relatively safely because the table is not expected to change while it is offline. So, it would seem that there is value in having an 'immutable' table state in the form of an offline table. Perhaps 'ondemand' is the alternate state that lets us do things like import, split, compact, merge, etc.
