This was actually a previous feature request by someone else: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-91
The implemented solution was to allow the location to be specified in the "alter table .. add partition" command. This has worked pretty well for us, however with the recent addition of hive support in amazon's elastic map-reduce, it would be really convenient if we could set it up so that our data in s3 could be auto-discovered without having to add partitions... (it's of the format bucket/data-source/YYYYMMDD[HH]). Amazon has support for simple key/val substitution in scripts, but since there's no kind of iteration/looping available, it's not really useful if you need to add a couple of weeks worth of partitions as part of your script.... If we could somehow define the partition directory layout, it would really simplify our hive scripting with elastic mapreduce... thanks, larry
