andrewcstewart
commented
3 years ago There are a few options here:
1) Simply DROP TABLE prior to CREATE TABLE as part of table creation.
2) DROP TABLE but conditional on whether table exists (test via SHOW TABLES)
3) test if table exists, if so then ALTER TABLE REPLACE COLUMNS.
4) possibly perform other ALTER TABLE operations for other table creation statements (like serde).
Currently tables are created with
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE IF NOT EXISTS {database}.{table}, but one may want to replace or update an existing table definition.