How to generate json object from hive SQL table description?

Question

I use describe formatted table_name to get the description of the table. I get following result. I want to convert this to json somehow. Any good approach for this? In other words, I want to get my sql table description as json. Not as a table like the one shown in following output.

The output which I want to get should look like :

{
    "columns" : {
        "id" : "int",
        "name": "string"
    },


    "partition_information": {
        "columns" : {
            "dt_temp" : "string"
        }
    },

    "Detailed table information" : {
        "Database" : "d1",
        "owner" : "root",
        .
        .
        .
        .
        .
        
    }
}

Is there any function or library that will do this for me? Right now, I'm doing this manually using python script, but it is very difficult and messy. I don't expect the exact same output that I mentioned, I'm looking for a way to parse this easily and meaningfully from some python script. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

DESCRIBE EXTENDED can produce JSON (checked it works fine on Hive 2.1.1):

set hive.ddl.output.format=json;
desc extended table_name;

It produces output like this:

{"columns":[{"name":"id","type":"bigint","comment":"from deserializer"}, 
            {"name":"col1","type":"string","comment":"from deserializer"},
            ...