Troubleshooting external tables

You might encounter the following issues when creating or querying external tables. For general data-load troubleshooting, see Troubleshooting data loads.

File not found or permission denied

If a query against an external table produces a file or permission error, ensure that the user executing the query has the necessary permissions in both Vertica and the file system. See the permissions section in Creating external tables.

Error 7226: cannot find partition column

When querying external tables backed by partitioned data, you might see an error message stating that a partition column is missing:

ERROR 7226: Cannot find partition column [region] in parquet source
[/data/table_int/int_original/000000_0]

If you create an external table and then change the partition structure, for example by renaming a column, you must then re-create the external table. If you see this error, update your table to match the partitioning on disk.

For more information about partition structure, see Partitioned file paths).

Error 6766: is a directory

When querying data, you might see an error message stating that an input file is a directory:

ERROR 6766: Error reading from orc parser input stream
[/tmp/orc_glob/more_nations]: Is a directory

This error occurs if the glob in the table's COPY FROM clause matches an empty directory. This error occurs only for files in the Linux file system; empty directories in HDFS are ignored.

To correct the error, make the glob more specific. Instead of *, for example, use *.orc.