Hi
I had the same problem. I found out that the table creation succeeds if one specifies the fully qualified hdfs location.
create external table test (a string); // works
create external table test_ext (a string) LOCATION ‘/warehouse/projects/mypath/public‘; fails
create external table test_ext (a string) LOCATION ‘hdfs://nameservice1/warehouse/projects/mypath/public‘; works fine
Hope this works for you too.
Deenar