Hive: Creating External Table from existing one

   Apache Hive is an excellent tool to retrieve data from HDFS  using SQL queries. I used Json Serde library to map Json files into Hive table.
So initially I created table like this:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE twitter (
  coordinates struct, type:string,
  created_at string,
  entities struct, text:string, urls:array, url:string, user_mentions:array, name:string, screen_name:string,
  favorite_count int,
  favorited boolean,
  filter_level string,
  geo struct, type:string,
  id_str string,
  in_reply_to_screen_name string,
  in_reply_to_status_id_str string,
  in_reply_to_user_id_str string,
  lang string,
  retweet_count int,
  retweeted boolean,
  retweeted_status struct, text:string, urls:array, url:string;, user_mentions:array, name:string, screen_name:string, favorite_count:int, favorited:boolean, geo:struct, type:string, id_str:string, in_reply_to_screen_name:string, in_reply_to_status_id_str:string, in_reply_to_user_id_str:string, lang:string, retweet_count:int, retweeted:boolean, source:string, text:string, truncated:boolean, user:struct,
  source string,
  text string,
  truncated boolean,
  user struct)
PARTITIONED BY (datehour INT)
ROW FORMAT SERDE 'com.cloudera.hive.serde.JSONSerDe'
LOCATION '/user/hive/warehouse/twitter';

Everything worked great, till I realized that the mapping was not working so well.. I was not able to retrieve original tweets of retweets(Retweeted_status) as there was some problem with data type mismatch.
So, I simplified the table schema with this:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE twitternew (
  id BIGINT,
  created_at STRING,
  source STRING,
  favorited BOOLEAN,
  retweet_count INT,
  retweeted_status STRUCT<
    text:STRING,
    user:STRUCT>,
  entities STRUCT<
    urls:ARRAY>,
    user_mentions:ARRAY>,
    hashtags:ARRAY>>,

  text STRING,
  user STRUCT<
    screen_name:STRING,
    name:STRING,
    friends_count:INT,
    followers_count:INT,
    statuses_count:INT,
    verified:BOOLEAN,
    utc_offset:INT,
    time_zone:STRING>,
  in_reply_to_screen_name STRING
)
PARTITIONED BY (datehour INT)
ROW FORMAT SERDE 'com.cloudera.hive.serde.JSONSerDe'
LOCATION '/user/hive/warehouse/twitter';

Now,  How we can move already partitioned table data from previous to the new one.
There were several options, First option is to execute HQL "load data inpath" again for each hourly accumulated folder. But it would take a lot of time moving all data from one folder to another.
So I found easy alternative way

"alter table twitternew add partition (datehour=2014010100);"

Call above script for each already indexed hours. In my case I wrote a bash script to call from "2014010100" to "2014061210". This will update the Hive metastore without moving any files anywhere.

Note that new table "twitternew" table has the same LOCATION path as previous table, also the partition name datehour must be same too.

You can drop the old table after successfully running your test sql queries. good luck!