# External tables

**URL:** <https://www.starburst.io/community/forum/t/external-tables/407>\
**Category:** Starburst Enterprise\
**Tags:** aws-glue, hive\
**Created:** [August 10, 2023, 5:29pm UTC](https://www.starburst.io/community/forum/t/external-tables/407 "2023-08-10T17:29:21Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![TrinoSlackHighlights](https://www.starburst.io/community/forum/user_avatar/www.starburst.io/trinoslackhighlights/32/174_2.png) [@TrinoSlackHighlights](https://www.starburst.io/community/forum/u/TrinoSlackHighlights)\
**Post date:** [August 10, 2023, 5:29pm UTC](https://www.starburst.io/community/forum/t/external-tables/407/1 "2023-08-10T17:29:21Z")

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We’re testing dropping external table with auto\_purge=true , but it seems it still only dropped the metadata and left the referenced data dir there. Our setup for hive is AWS Glue + AWS S3. I’m wondering if the auto\_purge is not supported for our setup or we missed anything?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![TrinoSlackHighlights](https://www.starburst.io/community/forum/user_avatar/www.starburst.io/trinoslackhighlights/32/174_2.png) [@TrinoSlackHighlights](https://www.starburst.io/community/forum/u/TrinoSlackHighlights)\
**Post date:** [August 10, 2023, 5:30pm UTC](https://www.starburst.io/community/forum/t/external-tables/407/2 "2023-08-10T17:30:16Z")

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I believe this property only works for the Hive metastore. But, Trino should delete the data when dropping a table in Glue. You can check for a WARN message in the coordinator logs with a message `Failed to delete path`. Trino will delete the data if it’s a managed table but not with an external table. Enable debug level log and see if you can find anything there