Case sensitive column names in Hive

Question

I am trying to create an external HIVE table with partitions. Some of my column names have Upper case letters. This caused a problem while creating tables since the values of column names with upper case letters were returned as NULL. I then modified the ParquetSerDe in order for it to handle this by using SERDEPROPERTIES and this was working with external tables (not partitioned). Now I am trying to create an external table WITH partitions, and whenever I try to access the upper case columns (Eg FieldName) I get this error. select FieldName from tablename;

    FAILED: RuntimeException Java. Lang.RuntimeException: cannot find field
    FieldName from
    [org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.objectinspector.UnionStructObjectInspector$MyField@4f45884b,
    org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.objectinspector.UnionStructObjectInspector$MyField@8f11f27,
    org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.objectinspector.UnionStructObjectInspector$MyField@77e8eb0e,
    org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.objectinspector.UnionStructObjectInspector$MyField@1dae4cd,
   org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.objectinspector.UnionStructObjectInspector$MyField@623e336d
   ]

Are there any suggestions you can think of? I cannot change the schema of the data source.

This is the command I use to create tables -

    CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE tablename (fieldname string)
    PARTITIONED BY (partion_name string)
    ROW FORMAT SERDE 'path.ModifiedParquetSerDeLatest'
    WITH SERDEPROPERTIES ("casesensitive"="FieldName")
    STORED AS INPUTFORMAT 'parquet.hive.DeprecatedParquetInputFormat'
    OUTPUTFORMAT 'parquet.hive.DeprecatedParquetOutputFormat'

And then add partition:

    ALTER TABLE tablename ADD PARTITION (partition_name='partitionvalue')
    LOCATION '/path/to/data'

Solution

This is an old question, but the partition column has to be case sensitive because of the unix filesystem on which it gets stored.

path "/columnname=value/" is always different from path "/columnName=value/" in unix

So it should be considered a bad practice to rely on case insensitive column names for Hive.