Data engineering·Files, formats and table layers
the partition value is encoded in the folder name as dt=2026-01-14, and the column does not exist inside the files at all.
Hive-style partitioning
Also calleddirectory partitioning, path partitioning
Encoding partition values in the object key path, so a reader infers them from the directory structure. It is simple, portable and universally understood, and it is why so much of the lake looks like a folder tree. Its weaknesses are what the table formats fix: renaming a partition scheme means rewriting every path, listing is expensive at scale, and the partition value is a string that must be parsed rather than a typed column.