How to check if a table exists in Hive?

I am connecting to Hive via an ODBC driver from a .NET application. Is there a query to determine if a table already exists?

For example, in MSSQL you can query the INFORMATION_SCHEMA table and in Netezza you can query the _v_table table.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Answer

There are two approaches by which you can check that:

1.) As @dimamah suggested, just to add one point here, for this approach you need to

 1.1) start the **hiveserver** before running the query
 1.2) you have to run two queries
      1.2.1) USE <database_name>
      1.2.2) SHOW TABLES LIKE 'table_name'
      1.2.3) Then you check your result using Result set.

2.) Second approach is to use HiveMetastoreClient APIs, where you can directly use the APIs to check whether the table_name exist in a particular database or not.

For further help please go through this Hive 11