How to determine the name of an Impala object corresponds to a view - impala

Question

Is there a way in Impala to determine whether an object name returned by SHOW TABLES corresponds to a table or a view since:
this statement only return the object names, without their type
SHOW CREATE VIEW is just an alias for SHOW CREATE TABLE (same result, no view/table distinction)
DESCRIBE does not give any clue about the type of the item
Ideally I'd like to list all the tables + views and their types using a single operation, not one to retrieve the tables + views and then another call for each name to determine the type of the object.
(please note the question is about Impala, not Hive)

Answer 1

You can use describe formatted to know the type of an object
impala-shell> CREATE TABLE table2(
id INT,
name STRING
);
impala-shell> CREATE VIEW view2 AS SELECT * FROM table2;
impala-shell> DESCRIBE FORMATTED table2;
+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------+
| name | type | comment |
+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------+
| Retention: | 0 | NULL |
| Location: | hdfs://quickstart.cloudera:8020/user/hive/warehouse/test.db/table2 | NULL |
| Table Type: | MANAGED_TABLE | NULL |
+------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------+
impala-shell> DESCRIBE FORMATTED view2;
+------------------------------+-------------------------------+----------------------+
| name | type | comment |
+------------------------------+-------------------------------+----------------------+
| Protect Mode: | None | NULL |
| Retention: | 0 | NULL |
| Table Type: | VIRTUAL_VIEW | NULL |
| Table Parameters: | NULL | NULL |
| | transient_lastDdlTime | 1601632695 |
| | NULL | NULL |
| # Storage Information | NULL | NULL |
+------------------------------+-------------------------------+----------------------+
In the case of the table type is Table Type: MANAGED_TABLE and for the view is Table Type: VIRTUAL_VIEW
Other way is querying metastore database (if you can) to know about metadata in Impala(or Hive)
mysql> use metastore;
mysql> select * from TBLS;
+--------+-------------+-------+------------------+-----------+-----------+-------+----------+---------------+------------------------------------------------------------+---------------------------+----------------+
| TBL_ID | CREATE_TIME | DB_ID | LAST_ACCESS_TIME | OWNER | RETENTION | SD_ID | TBL_NAME | TBL_TYPE | VIEW_EXPANDED_TEXT | VIEW_ORIGINAL_TEXT | LINK_TARGET_ID |
+--------+-------------+-------+------------------+-----------+-----------+-------+----------+---------------+------------------------------------------------------------+---------------------------+----------------+
| 9651 | 1601631971 | 9331 | 0 | anonymous | 0 | 27996 | table1 | MANAGED_TABLE | NULL | NULL | NULL |
| 9652 | 1601632121 | 9331 | 0 | anonymous | 0 | 27997 | view1 | VIRTUAL_VIEW | SELECT `table1`.`id`, `table1`.`name` FROM `test`.`table1` | SELECT * FROM table1 | NULL |
| 9653 | 1601632676 | 9331 | 0 | cloudera | 0 | 27998 | table2 | MANAGED_TABLE | NULL | NULL | NULL |
| 9654 | 1601632695 | 9331 | 0 | cloudera | 0 | 27999 | view2 | VIRTUAL_VIEW | SELECT * FROM test.table2 | SELECT * FROM test.table2 | NULL |
+--------+-------------+-------+------------------+-----------+-----------+-------+----------+---------------+------------------------------------------------------------+---------------------------+----------------+