Hive Concepts - ignacio-alorre/Hive GitHub Wiki

External Table

A External table (also known as unmanaged tables) can be created using the EXTERNAL keyword that lets you create a table and provide a LOCATION so that Hive does not use a default location (which is set with hive.metastore.warehouse.dir). This is specially useful when you already have data in a directory, maybe imported from a different database.

When dropping an EXTERNAL table, the files used to generate that table are NOT deleted from the file system.

We can keep from: http://bhupendramishra.blogspot.com/2015/12/hive-partitioned-by-distributed-by-sort.html?_sm_au_=iVVSVs0SR68qTRD6Jf17vK0T8QQJ4