Currently (starting from Drill version 1.8 and older) Drill supports only permanent tables [1] which are created using create table as select statement (hereinafter CTAS). They are created physically on disk and can be accessed by all users and persist after user session is closed. Data format stored in permanent tables can be regulated using store.format option. Permanent tables which store data in parquet format can be partitioned [2]. Permanent tables can be dropped using DROP command [3]. Permanent tables can be created only using CTAS statement and currently do not support INSERT statement.
Drill also supports views [4] which are created as files on disk with .view.drill extension. Such files contain select statement which can combine multiple sources. Access to views can be restricted using impersonalization [5]. As permanent tables views persist after user session is closed. Views can be dropped using DROP command [6].
Permanent tables and views can be cre