title: Dropping multiple partitions in Impala/Hive
body: <p>1- I'm trying to delete multiple partitions at once, but struggling to do it with either Impala or Hive. I tried the following query, with and without <code>'</code>:</p>
  
  <p><code>ALTER TABLE cz_prd_corrti_st.s1mme_transstats_info DROP IF EXISTS
   PARTITION (pr_load_time='20170701000317')
   PARTITION (pr_load_time='20170701000831')</code></p>
  
  <p>The error I'm getting is as follow:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>AnalysisException:
    Syntax error in line 3: PARTITION (pr_load_time='20170701000831') ^
    Encountered: PARTITION Expected: CACHED, LOCATION, PURGE, SET,
    UNCACHED CAUSED BY: Exception: Syntax error</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>The partition column is bigint type, query for deleting only one partition works as expected:</p>
  
  <pre><code>ALTER TABLE cz_prd_corrti_st.s1mme_transstats_info DROP IF EXISTS
  PARTITION   (pr_load_time='20170701000317')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>2- Is it a good practice delete the hdfs data first and then drop the partitions in Impala/Hive, or is it supposed to be done vice versa?</p>