"INSERT INTO ..." with SparkSQL HiveContext

Question

I'm trying to run an insert statement with my HiveContext, like this:

hiveContext.sql('insert into my_table (id, score) values (1, 10)')

The 1.5.2 Spark SQL Documentation doesn't explicitly state whether this is supported or not, although it does support "dynamic partition insertion".

This leads to a stack trace like

AnalysisException: 
Unsupported language features in query: insert into my_table (id, score) values (1, 10)
TOK_QUERY 0, 0,20, 0
  TOK_FROM 0, -1,20, 0
    TOK_VIRTUAL_TABLE 0, -1,20, 0
      TOK_VIRTUAL_TABREF 0, -1,-1, 0
        TOK_ANONYMOUS 0, -1,-1, 0
      TOK_VALUES_TABLE 1, 13,20, 41
        TOK_VALUE_ROW 1, 15,20, 41
          1 1, 16,16, 41
          10 1, 19,19, 44
  TOK_INSERT 1, 0,-1, 12
    TOK_INSERT_INTO 1, 0,11, 12
      TOK_TAB 1, 4,4, 12
        TOK_TABNAME 1, 4,4, 12
          my_table 1, 4,4, 12
      TOK_TABCOLNAME 1, 7,10, 22
        id 1, 7,7, 22
        score 1, 10,10, 26
    TOK_SELECT 0, -1,-1, 0
      TOK_SELEXPR 0, -1,-1, 0
        TOK_ALLCOLREF 0, -1,-1, 0

scala.NotImplementedError: No parse rules for:
 TOK_VIRTUAL_TABLE 0, -1,20, 0
  TOK_VIRTUAL_TABREF 0, -1,-1, 0
    TOK_ANONYMOUS 0, -1,-1, 0
  TOK_VALUES_TABLE 1, 13,20, 41
    TOK_VALUE_ROW 1, 15,20, 41
      1 1, 16,16, 41
      10 1, 19,19, 44

Is there any other way to insert to a Hive table that is supported?

Answer 1

Data can be appended to a Hive table using the append mode on the DataFrameWriter.

data = hc.sql("select 1 as id, 10 as score")
data.write.mode("append").saveAsTable("my_table")

This gives the same result as an insert.