FWIW, the wiki states that the function returns a string
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/LanguageManual+UDFhttps://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/LanguageManual+UDF
From: Long, Andrew [loand...@amazon.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2016 5:31 PM
To: user@hive.apache.org
Subject: Possible Bug: to_date("2015-01-15") returns a string
Hello Everyone,
I ran into this unusual behavior while converting a date string into a date. I
was surprised to find out that to_date will occasionally return a string.
Does this make sense?
Cheers Andrew
hive> CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE datebug
> AS SELECT to_date("2015-01-10");
Query ID = hadoop_20160630232727_15668184-3af0-4221-a794-9b2a94d4740e
Total jobs = 1
Launching Job 1 out of 1
Tez session was closed. Reopening...
Session re-established.
Status: Running (Executing on YARN cluster with App id
application_1467163153575_0039)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VERTICES STATUS TOTAL COMPLETED RUNNING PENDING FAILED KILLED
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Map 1 .......... SUCCEEDED 1 1 0 0 0 0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VERTICES: 01/01 [==========================>>] 100% ELAPSED TIME: 5.77 s
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Moving data to:
hdfs://ip-172-31-1-35.ec2.internal:8020/tmp/hive/hadoop/a1f9f4d0-36ed-419f-bec3-9b286a7c1201/_tmp_space.db/9c51562e-f8a1-4de8-93a5-f3e874368f43
Table default.datebug stats: [numFiles=1, numRows=1, totalSize=11,
rawDataSize=10]
OK
Time taken: 11.968 seconds
hive> describe datebug;
OK
_c0 string
Time taken: 0.004 seconds, Fetched: 1 row(s)
hive>
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