Question on modifying a table to become external

[Eva Tse]

We created a table without the ŒEXTERNAL¹ qualifier but did specify a
location for the warehouse. We would like to modify this to be an external
table. We tried to drop the table, but it does delete the files in the S3
external location. 

Is there a way we could achieve this?

Thanks,
Eva.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS exampletable
(
    other_properties Map<string, string>,
    event_ts_ms bigint,
    hostname string
)
PARTITIONED by (dateint int, hour int)
ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\001' COLLECTION ITEMS TERMINATED
BY '\004' MAP KEYS TERMINATED BY '\002' stored as SEQUENCEFILE
LOCATION ' s3n://bucketname/hive/warehouse/exampletable';