Internal (Managed) and External (Non Managed) Tables in Apache Hive

In Hive, we have two kinds of tables available.

Managed or internal tables that are controlled by the hive when it comes to their data and metadata.

And the second type of tables is the External table, hive only control metadata for these tables.

By default hive creates managed tables.

That means any table which we do not explicitly specify as an external table, will be created as an Internal or managed table.

When we drop managed tables from the hive, not only its metadata is deleted from Hive but also data is deleted from HDFS.

Hive only drops metadata for that table keeping original data at its location. As it is an external table, Hive does not assume that it owns table data and keeps it as it is in HDFS.