---

layout: global title: SET VAR displayTitle: SET VAR license: | Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

 http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Description

The SET VAR command sets a temporary variable which has been previously declared in the current session.

To set a config variable or a hive variable use SET.

Syntax

SET { VAR | VARIABLE }
  { { variable_name = { expression | DEFAULT } } [, ...] |
    ( variable_name [, ...] ) = ( query ) }

Parameters

• variable_name

  Specifies an existing variable. If you specify multiple variables, there must not be any duplicates.

• expression

  Any expression, including scalar subqueries.

• DEFAULT

  If you specify DEFAULT, the default expression of the variable is assigned, or NULL if there is none.

• query

  A query that returns at most one row and as many columns as the number of specified variables. Each column must be implicitly castable to the data type of the corresponding variable. If the query returns no row NULL values are assigned.

Examples

-- 
DECLARE VARIABLE var1 INT DEFAULT 7;
DECLARE VARIABLE var2 STRING;

-- A simple assignment
SET VAR var1 = 5;
SELECT var1;
  5

-- A complex expression assignment
SET VARIABLE var1 = (SELECT max(c1) FROM VALUES(1), (2) AS t(c1));
SELECT var1;
  2

-- resetting the variable to DEFAULT
SET VAR var1 = DEFAULT;
SELECT var1;
  7

-- A multi variable assignment
SET VAR (var1, var2) = (SELECT max(c1), CAST(min(c1) AS STRING) FROM VALUES(1), (2) AS t(c1));
SELECT var1, var2;
 2 1

-- Too many rows
SET VAR (var1, var2) = (SELECT c1, CAST(c1 AS STRING) FROM VALUES(1), (2) AS t(c1));
Error: ROW_SUBQUERY_TOO_MANY_ROWS

-- No rows
SET VAR (var1, var2) = (SELECT c1, CAST(c1 AS STRING) FROM VALUES(1), (2) AS t(c1) WHERE 1=0);
SELECT var1, var2;
  NULL NULL

Related Statements

• SET