Convert string to timestamp in Hive

Looks like your format has three millisecond digits. I'd guess that, according to the SimpleDateFormat, you would need to use the following:

from_unixtime(unix_timestamp('20130502081559999', 'yyyyMMddHHmmssSSS'))

Hope that helps.

Suppose you have input file like this

file:///data/csv/temptable/temp.csv

1   2015-01-01  
2   2015-10-10 12:00:00.232
3   2016-02-02
4   2015-09-12 23:08:07.124

Then you can also try this approach:

create external table temptable(id string, datetime string) row format delimited fields terminated by '\t' stored as textfile LOCATION 'file:///data/csv/temptable';

create table mytime as select id, from_utc_timestamp(date_format(datetime,'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS'),'UTC') as datetime from temptable;

Not sure what you mean by "better way" but you can always write your own function to handle the date conversion.