Selecting zipcode that is stored in string as numberic range (hive)

I’d like to select people who live in california zipcodes. However this table i’m using stores zipcodes as string, instead of integers, so I havre to put a qutoe around it.

How can I select these values in range, instead of having to type it out? I’d like to do something like this: select people from tablename where postal_code >= '90001' and postal_code <= '96162'

Thank you!

Answer

While your query would probably work for this specific interval, you would be better off casting the strings to integers to do proper numeric comparison:

select people 
from tablename 
where cast(postal_code as int) between 90001 and 96162

String and number comparison do not follow the same rules, and you would eventually get unexpected results by comparing strings. For example, string-wise, '9' is greater than '10'.