how to register an existing delta table to hive

Question

We are using spark for reading/writing data in delta format stored in HDFS (Databricks Delta table version 0.5.0).

We would like to utilize the power of Hive to interact with the delta tables.

How can we register an existing data in delta format from a path on HDFS to Hive?

Please note that currently we are running spark (2.4.0) on cloudera platform (CDH 6.3.3)

Answer 1

The only way I can do this so far is by registering it as an unmanaged table. The most significant difference, as far as I can tell, is that if you drop an unmanaged table, it does not drop the underlying data.