title: Hive alter serde properties not working
body: <p>I'm trying to change the existing Hive external table delimiter from comma <code>,</code> to <code>ctrl+A</code> character by using Hive ALTER TABLE statement</p>
  
  <pre><code>ALTER TABLE table_name SET SERDEPROPERTIES ('field.delim' = '\u0001');
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>After the DDL I could see changes </p>
  
  <pre><code>show create table table_name
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But when I select from Hive, the values are all NULL (underlying files in HDFS are changed to have ctrl+A delimiter).</p>
  
  <p>I have repaired the table also by using msck.</p>
  
  <p>Only way to see the data is dropping and re-creating the external table, can anyone please help me to understand the reason.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Table Syntax :</strong></p>
  
  <blockquote>
  <pre><code>CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE `table_name`(
    col1,
    col2,
    col3)
  PARTITIONED BY ( 
    `ing_year` int, 
    `ing_month` int, 
    `ing_day` int)
  ROW FORMAT DELIMITED 
    FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' 
    LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' 
  STORED AS INPUTFORMAT 
    'org.apache.hadoop.mapred.TextInputFormat' 
  OUTPUTFORMAT 
    'org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.io.HiveIgnoreKeyTextOutputFormat'
  LOCATION
    'hdfs://location/'
  </code></pre>
  </blockquote>