[SOLVED] How to get the schema (columns and their types) of ORC files stored in HDFS?

How to get the schema (columns and their types) of ORC files stored in HDFS?

I have ORC files stored in different folders on HDFS as follows:

/DATA/UNIVERSITY/DEPT/STUDENT/part-00000.orc
/DATA/UNIVERSITY/DEPT/CREDIT/part-00000.orc

I do not know how many columns are present in each of those tables (STUDENT, CREDIT, etc). Is there a way to get the schemas from these files? I'm looking for obtaining columns names and their data types so that I could write CREATE statements for Hive EXTERNAL tables.

Solution

Found a way to get the details (column names, data types) I wanted via Spark

data = sqlContext.sql("SELECT * FROM orc.`<HDFS_path>`");
data.printSchema()

This will print the output in below format, which is exaclty the information I want to extract from the ORC files on HDFS:

root
 |-- <column_name1>: <datatype> (nullable = <true/false>)
 |-- <column_name2>: <datatype> (nullable = <true/false>)
 |-- <column_name3>: <datatype> (nullable = <true/false>)
 |-- <column_name4>: <datatype> (nullable = <true/false>)
 |-- <column_name5>: <datatype> (nullable = <true/false>)