Hi,
I believe in the same way as UNIX file/partitions behave. If the file is opened by the first process writing to it, a swap file will be created. If the second process is querying it only, then it will see the data at the time of last save by the first process but not the changes after last save It will behave much like versioning in an RDBMS. HTH Mich Talebzadeh http://talebzadehmich.wordpress.com Author of the books "A Practitioner's Guide to Upgrading to Sybase ASE 15", ISBN 978-0-9563693-0-7. co-author "Sybase Transact SQL Guidelines Best Practices", ISBN 978-0-9759693-0-4 Publications due shortly: Creating in-memory Data Grid for Trading Systems with Oracle TimesTen and Coherence Cache Oracle and Sybase, Concepts and Contrasts, ISBN: 978-0-9563693-1-4, volume one out shortly NOTE: The information in this email is proprietary and confidential. This message is for the designated recipient only, if you are not the intended recipient, you should destroy it immediately. Any information in this message shall not be understood as given or endorsed by Peridale Ltd, its subsidiaries or their employees, unless expressly so stated. It is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure that this email is virus free, therefore neither Peridale Ltd, its subsidiaries nor their employees accept any responsibility. From: Grant Overby (groverby) [mailto:grove...@cisco.com] Sent: 14 April 2015 19:46 To: user@hive.apache.org Subject: External Table with unclosed orc files. What will Hive do if querying an external table containing orc files that are still being written to? If the process writing the orc files exits without calling .close()? Sorry for taking the cheap way out and asking instead of testing. I couldn't find anything on this via google. I won't be able to test these scenarios till tomorrow and would like to have some idea of what to expect this afternoon.