Hive is a data warehouse infrastructure tool to process structured data in Hadoop.

It
resides on top of Hadoop to summarize Big Data, and makes querying and analyzing easy.

This is a brief tutorial that provides an introduction on how to use Apache Hive HiveQL
with Hadoop Distributed File System. This tutorial can be your first step towards becoming
a successful Hadoop Developer with Hive.

The term ‘Big Data’ is used for collections of large datasets that include huge
volume, high velocity, and a variety of data that is increasing day by day. Using
traditional data management systems, it is difficult to process Big Data. Hive is not

 A relational database
 A design for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)
 A language for real-time queries and row-level updates
Features of Hive

 It stores schema in a database and processed data into HDFS.

 It is designed for OLAP.
 It provides SQL type language for querying called HiveQL or HQL.
 It is familiar, fast, scalable, and extensible.
 The following diagram depicts the workflow between Hive and Hadoop.


Saying Hello to Hive

Hive provides Hadoop with a bridge to the RDBMS world and provides an SQL dialect
known as Hive Query Language (HiveQL), which can be used to perform SQL-like tasks.
Hive also makes possible the concept known as enterprise data warehouse (EDW)
augmentation, a leading use case for Apache Hadoop, where data warehouses are set up
as RDBMSs built specifically for data analysis and reporting. Hive closely associated with
RDBMS/EDW technology is extract, transform, and load (ETL) technology. For example, a
company or an organization might extract unstructured text data from an Internet forum,
transform the data into a structured format that’s both valuable and useful, and then load
the structured data into its EDW. Apache Hive gives you powerful analytical tools, all
within the framework of HiveQL.
Seeing How the Hive is Put Together
In this section, we illustrate the architecture of Apache Hive and explain its various
components, as shown in the illustration in Figure 1. Figure 1: The Apache Hive
architecture.
 As shown in the above image, the Hive Architecture can be categorized into the
following components: As shown in the above image, the Hive Architecture can be
categorized into the following components:

 Hive Clients: Hive supports application written in many languages like Java, C++,
Python etc. using JDBC, Thrift and ODBC drivers. Hence one can always write hive
client application written in a language of their choice.
 Hive Services: Apache Hive provides various services like CLI, Web Interface etc. to
perform queries. We will explore each one of them shortly in this Hive tutorial blog.
 Processing framework and Resource Management: Internally, Hive uses Hadoop
MapReduce framework as de facto engine to execute the queries. Hadoop
MapReduce framework is a separate topic in itself and therefore, is not discussed
here.
 Distributed Storage: As Hive is installed on top of Hadoop, it uses the underlying
HDFS for the distributed storage. You can refer to the HDFS blog to learn more about
it.

Now, let us explore the first two major components in the Hive Architecture:

1. Hive Clients:

Apache Hive supports different types of client applications for performing queries on
the Hive. These clients can be categorized into three types:

 Thrift Clients: As Hive server is based on Apache Thrift, it can serve the request
from all those programming language that supports Thrift.
 JDBC Clients: Hive allows Java applications to connect to it using the JDBC driver
which is defined in the class org.apache.hadoop.hive.jdbc.HiveDriver.
  ODBC Clients: The Hive ODBC Driver allows applications that support the ODBC
protocol to connect to Hive. (Like the JDBC driver, the ODBC driver uses Thrift to
communicate with the Hive server.)

2. Hive Services:

Hive provides many services as shown in the image above. Let us have a look at each of
them:

 Hive CLI (Command Line Interface): This is the default shell provided by the Hive
where you can execute your Hive queries and commands directly.
 Apache Hive Web Interfaces: Apart from the command line interface, Hive also
provides a web based GUI for executing Hive queries and commands.
 Hive Server: Hive server is built on Apache Thrift and therefore, is also referred as
Thrift Server that allows different clients to submit requests to Hive and retrieve the
final result.
 Apache Hive Driver: It is responsible for receiving the queries submitted through
the CLI, the web UI, Thrift, ODBC or JDBC interfaces by a client. Then, the driver
passes the query to the compiler where parsing, type checking and semantic analysis
takes place with the help of schema present in the metastore. In the next step, an
optimized logical plan is generated in the form of a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) of
map-reduce tasks and HDFS tasks. Finally, the execution engine executes these
tasks in the order of their dependencies, using Hadoop.
 Metastore: You can think metastore as a central repository for storing all the Hive
metadata information. Hive metadata includes various types of information like
structure of tables and the partitions along with the column, column type, serializer
and deserializer which is required for Read/Write operation on the data present in
HDFS. The metastore comprises of two fundamental units:
o A service that provides metastore access to other Hive services.
o Disk storage for the metadata which is separate from HDFS storage.

Now, let us understand the different ways of implementing Hive metastore in the next
section of this Hive Tutorial.

Getting Started with Apache Hive

We are running Hive in stand-alone mode rather than in a real-life Apache Hadoop
cluster, configure the system to use local storage rather than the HDFS: Simply set the
hive.metastore.warehouse.dir parameter. When you start a Hive client, the $HIVE_HOME
environment variable tells the client that it should look for our configuration file
(hivesite.xml) in the conf directory. If you already have a Hadoop cluster configured and
running, you need to set the hive.metastore.warehouse.dir configuration variable to the
HDFS directory where you intend to store your Hive warehouse, set the
mapred.job.tracker configuration variable to point to your Hadoop JobTracker, and set up
a distributed metastore.

Examining the Hive Clients There are quite a number of client options for Hive as below.

1. Hive command-line interface (CLI)

2. Hive Web Interface (HWI) Server
3. Open source SQuirreL client using the JDBC driver
In the second figure, the architecture is streamlined to focus only on the components that

are required when running the CLI.

These are the components of Hive that are needed when running the CLI on a Hadoop

cluster. Here, you run Hive in local mode, which uses local storage, rather than the HDFS,

for your data.

To run the Hive CLI, you execute the hive command and specify the CLI as the service you

want to run. In the following listing, you can see the command that’s required as well as

some of our first HiveQL statements. (A steps annotation using the A-B-C model is

included in the listing to direct your attention to the key commands.)

(A) $ $HIVE_HOME/bin hive --service cli

(B) hive> set hive.cli.print.current.db=true;
(C) hive (default)> CREATE DATABASE ourfirstdatabase;
OK
Time taken: 3.756 seconds
(D) hive (default)> USE ourfirstdatabase;
OK
Time taken: 0.039 seconds
(E) hive (ourfirstdatabase)> CREATE TABLE our_first_table (
> FirstName STRING,
> LastName STRING,
> EmployeeId INT);
OK
Time taken: 0.043 seconds
hive (ourfirstdatabase)> quit;
(F) $ ls /home/biadmin/Hive/warehouse/ourfirstdatabase.db
our_first_table

The first command (see Step A) starts the Hive CLI using the $HIVE_HOME environment

variable. The –service clicommand-line option directs the Hive system to start the

command-line interface, though you could have chosen other servers.

Next, in Step B, you tell the Hive CLI to print your current working database so that you

know where you are in the namespace. (This statement will make sense after we explain

how to use the next command, so hold tight.) In Step C you use HiveQL’s data definition

language (DDL) to create your first database. (Remember that databases in Hive are

simply namespaces where particular tables reside; because a set of tables can be thought

of as a database or schema, you could have used the term SCHEMA in place

of DATABASE to accomplish the same result.).

More specifically, you’re using DDL to tell the system to create a database

called ourfirstdatabase and then to make this database the default for subsequent HiveQL

DDL commands using the USE command in Step D. In Step E, you create your first table

and give it the (quite appropriate) name our_first_table.

(Until now, you may have believed that it looks a lot like SQL, with perhaps a few minor

differences in syntax depending on which RDBMS you’re accustomed to — and you would

have been right.) The last command, in Step F, carries out a directory listing of your

chosen Hive warehouse directory so that you can see that our_first_table has in fact been

stored on disk.

Hive Web Interface (HWI)

Using the Hive CLI requires only one command to start the Hive shell, but when you want

to access Hive using a web browser, you first need to start the HWI Server and then point

your browser to the port on which the server is listening. The following figureillustrates

how this type of Hive client configuration might work.

 The Hive Web Interface is an alternative to using the Hive command line interface.
Using the web interface is a great way to get started with Hive. The Hive Web Interface,
abbreviated as HWI, is a simple graphical user interface (GUI).

Configuration

Hive Web Interface made its first appearance in the 0.2 branch. If you have Hive
release 0.2 or later, or the SVN trunk, then you already have it. You should not need
to edit the defaults for the Hive Web Interface. HWI uses:
hive-site.xml
<property>
<name>hive.hwi.war.file</name>
<value>lib/hive-hwi-0.12.0.war</value>
<description>This sets the path to the HWI war file, relative to . </description>
</property>

<property>
<name>hive.hwi.listen.host</name>
<value>0.0.0.0</value>
<description>This is the host address the Hive Web Interface will listen on</description>
</property>

<property>
<name>hive.hwi.listen.port</name>
<value>9999</value>
<description>This is the port the Hive Web Interface will listen on</description>
</property>
To start HWI service
$ HIVE_HOME/bin/hive --service hwi
You can browse to hive web interface at URL
http://localhost:9999/hwi
1. Using the commands in the following listing, configure the $HIVE_HOME/conf/hive-
site.xml file to ensure that Hive can find and load the HWI’s Java server pages.

2. <property>
3. <name>hive.hwi.war.file</name>
4. <value>${HIVE_HOME}/lib/hive_hwi.war</value>
5. <description>This is the WAR file with the jsp
6. content for Hive Web Interface</description>

</property>

7. The HWI Server requires Apache Ant libraries to run, so you need to download more files.
Download Ant from the Apache site.

8. Install Ant using the following commands:

9. mkdir ant
10. cp apache-ant-1.9.2-bin.tar.gz ant; cd ant
11. gunzip apache-ant-1.9.2-bin.tar.gz

tar xvf apache-ant-1.9.2-bin.tar

12. Set the $ANT_LIB environment variable and start the HWI Server by using the following
commands:

13. $ export ANT_LIB=/home/user/ant/apache-ant-1.9.2/lib

14. $ bin/hive --service hwi
15. 13/09/24 16:54:37 INFO hwi.HWIServer: HWI is starting up
16. ...

13/09/24 16:54:38 INFO mortbay.log: Started SocketConnector@0.0.0.0:9999

In a production environment, you’d probably configure two other

properties: hive.hwi.listen.host and hive.hwi.listen.port. You can use the first property to

set the IP address of the system running your HWI Server, and use the second to set the

port that the HWI Server listens on.

In this exercise, you use the default settings: With the HWI Server now running, you

simply enter the URL http://localhost:9999/hwi/ into your web browser and view the

metadata for our_first_table.

 SQuirreL SQL is an open source tool that acts as a Hive client. You can download this

universal SQL client from the SourceForge website. It provides a user interface to Hive

and simplifies the tasks of querying large tables and analyzing data with Apache Hive.

The figure illustrates how the Hive architecture would work when using tools such as

SQuirreL.

You can see that the SQuirreL client uses the JDBC APIs to pass commands to the Hive

Driver by way of the Server.

Follow these steps to get SQuirreL running:

1. Start the Hive Thrift Server using the command lsiting:

2. $ $HIVE_HOME/bin/hive --service hiveserver -p 10000 -v

3. Starting Hive Thrift Server

Starting Hive Thrift Server on port 10000 with 100 min worker threads and 2147483647
max worker threads

4. Download the latest SQuirreL distribution from the SourceForge site into a directory of
your choice.

5. Uncompress the SQuirreL package using the gunzip command and expand the archive
using the tar command.

gunzip squirrel-sql-3.5.0-standard.tar.gz; tar xvf squirrel-sql-3.5.0-standard.tar.gz

6. Change to the new SQuirreL release directory and start the tool using the following
command.

$ cd squirrel-sql-3.5.0-standard;./squirrel-sql.sh
Note that the instructions for including the Hadoop core .jar file may differ depending on
the Hadoop release. In this case, the Hadoop .jar file was named hadoop-core-1.2.1.jar, so
including $HADOOP_HOME/hadoop-*-core.jar per the online instructions was incorrect.

Hive supports different data types to be used in table columns. The data types supported
by Hive can be broadly classified in Primitive and Complex data types.

The primitive data types supported by Hive are listed below:

1. Numeric Types

 TINYINT (1-byte signed integer, from -128 to 127)

 SMALLINT (2-byte signed integer, from -32,768 to 32,767)
 INT (4-byte signed integer, from -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647)
 BIGINT (8-byte signed integer, from -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to
9,223,372,036,854,775,807)
 FLOAT (4-byte single precision floating point number)
 DOUBLE (8-byte double precision floating point number)
 DECIMAL (Hive 0.13.0 introduced user definable precision and scale)

2. Date/Time Types

 TIMESTAMP
 DATE

3. String Types

 STRING
 VARCHAR
 CHAR

4. Misc Types

 BOOLEAN
 BINARY

Apart from these primitive data types Hive offers some complex data types which are listed
below:

5. Complex Types

 arrays: ARRAY<data_type>
 maps: MAP<primitive_type, data_type>
 structs: STRUCT<col_name : data_type [COMMENT col_comment], ...>
 union: UNIONTYPE<data_type, data_type, ...>

ARRAY Data Type

Same as Array in java,An Ordered sequences of similar type elements that are index
using zero-based integers
Example array(‘John’, ‘Doe’)

The second value is accused by using array[1]

MAP Data Type

Collection of key-value pairs. Fields are accessed using array notation of keys (e.g., [‘key’]).

Example map(‘first’, ‘John’,’last’, ‘Doe’)

if a column name is of type MAP with key→value pairs ‘first’→’John’ and ‘last’→’Doe’, then
the last name can be referenced using name[‘last’].

STRUCT Data Type

 It is similar to STRUCT in C language. It is a record type which encapsulates a set of

named fields that can be any primitive data type. Elements in STRUCT type are
accessed using the DOT (.) notation.
Example – For a column c of type STRUCT {a INT; b INT} the a field is accessed by the
expression c.a

UNIONTYPE

UNIONTYPE is collection of Heterogeneous data types.It is similar to Unions in C. At any

point of time, an Union Type can hold any one (exactly one) data type from its specified data
types

Example

UNIONTYPE<int, double, array<string>, struct<a:int,b:string>>

HiveQL is the Hive query language. Like all SQL dialects in widespread use, it doesn’t fully
conform to any particular revision of the ANSI SQL standard. It is perhaps closest to
MySQL’s dialect, but with significant differences. Hive offers no support for row-level
inserts, updates, and deletes. Hive doesn’t support transactions. Hive adds extensions to
provide better performance in the context of Hadoop and to integrate with custom
extensions and even external programs.

Still, much of HiveQL will be familiar. This chapter and the ones that follow discuss the
features of HiveQL using representative examples. In some cases, we will briefly mention
details for completeness, then explore them more fully in later chapters.

This chapter starts with the so-called data definition language parts of HiveQL, which are
used for creating, altering, and dropping databases, tables, views, functions, and indexes.
We’ll discuss databases and tables in this chapter, deferring the discussion of views
until Chapter 7, indexes until Chapter 8, and functions until Chapter 13.

We’ll also discuss the SHOW and DESCRIBE commands for listing and describing items
as we go.

Subsequent chapters explore the data manipulation language parts of HiveQL that are
used to put data into Hive tables and to extract data to the filesystem, and how to explore
and manipulate data with queries, grouping, filtering, joining, etc.

Databases in Hive

The Hive concept of a database is essentially just a catalog or namespace of tables.

However, they are very useful for larger clusters with multiple teams and users, as a way
of avoiding table name collisions. It’s also common to use databases to organize
production tables into logical groups.

If you don’t specify a database, the default database is used.

The simplest syntax for creating a database is shown in the following example:

hive> CREATE DATABASE financials;

Hive will throw an error if financials already exists. You can suppress these warnings with
this variation:

hive> CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS financials;

While normally you might like to be warned if a database of the same name already exists,
the IF NOT EXISTS clause is useful for scripts that should create a database on-the-fly, if
necessary, before proceeding.

You can also use the keyword SCHEMA instead of DATABASE in all the database-related
commands.

At any time, you can see the databases that already exist as follows:

hive> SHOW DATABASES;

default
financials
hive> CREATE DATABASE human_resources;
hive> SHOW DATABASES;
default
financials
human_resources

CREATE Database,Table

DROP Database,Table

TRUNCATE Table

ALTER Database,Table

SHOW Databases,Tables,Table Properties,Partitions,Functions,Index

DESCRIBE Database, Table ,View

DDL Commands in Hive

If you have a lot of databases, you can restrict the ones listed using a regular expression, a
concept we’ll explain in LIKE and RLIKE, if it is new to you. The following example lists
only those databases that start with the letter h and end with any other characters
(the .* part):

hive> SHOW DATABASES LIKE 'h.*';

human_resources
hive> ...
Hive will create a directory for each database. Tables in that database will be stored in
subdirectories of the database directory. The exception is tables in the default database,
which doesn’t have its own directory.

The database directory is created under a top-level directory specified by the

property hive.metastore.warehouse.dir, which we discussed in Local Mode
Configuration and Distributed and Pseudodistributed Mode Configuration. Assuming you
are using the default value for this property,/user/hive/warehouse, when
the financials database is created, Hive will create the
directory /user/hive/warehouse/financials.db. Note the .dbextension.

You can override this default location for the new directory as shown in this example:

hive> CREATE DATABASE financials

> LOCATION '/my/preferred/directory';

You can add a descriptive comment to the database, which will be shown by
the DESCRIBE DATABASE <database> command.

hive> CREATE DATABASE financials

> COMMENT 'Holds all financial tables';

hive> DESCRIBE DATABASE financials;

financials Holds all financial tables
hdfs://master-server/user/hive/warehouse/financials.db

Note that DESCRIBE DATABASE also shows the directory location for the database. In
this example, the URI scheme is hdfs. For a MapR installation, it would be maprfs. For an
Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) cluster, it would also be hdfs, but you could
set hive.metastore.warehouse.dir to use Amazon S3 explicitly (i.e., by
specifying s3n://bucketname/… as the property value). You could use s3 as the scheme,
but the newer s3n is preferred.

In the output of DESCRIBE DATABASE, we’re showing master-server to indicate the

URI authority, in this case a DNS name and optional port number (i.e., server:port) for the
“master node” of the filesystem (i.e., where theNameNode service is running for HDFS). If
you are running in pseudo-distributed mode, then the master server will be localhost.
For local mode, the path will be a local path, file:///user/hive/warehouse/financials.db.
If the authority is omitted, Hive uses the master-server name and port defined by the
property fs.default.name in the Hadoop configuration files, found in
the $HADOOP_HOME/conf directory.

To be clear, hdfs:///user/hive/warehouse/financials.db is equivalent tohdfs://master-

server/user/hive/warehouse/financials.db, where master-server is your master node’s
DNS name and optional port.

For completeness, when you specify a relative path (e.g., some/relative/path), Hive will put
this under your home directory in the distributed filesystem (e.g.,hdfs:///user/<user-
name>) for HDFS. However, if you are running in local mode, your current working
directory is used as the parent ofsome/relative/path.

For script portability, it’s typical to omit the authority, only specifying it when referring to
another distributed filesystem instance (including S3 buckets).

Lastly, you can associate key-value properties with the database, although their only
function currently is to provide a way of adding information to the output of DESCRIBE
DATABASE EXTENDED <database>:

hive> CREATE DATABASE financials

> WITH DBPROPERTIES ('creator' = 'Mark Moneybags', 'date' = '2012-01-02');

hive> DESCRIBE DATABASE financials;

financials hdfs://master-server/user/hive/warehouse/financials.db

hive> DESCRIBE DATABASE EXTENDED financials;

financials hdfs://master-server/user/hive/warehouse/financials.db
{date=2012-01-02, creator=Mark Moneybags);

The USE command sets a database as your working database, analogous to changing
working directories in a filesystem:

hive> USE financials;

Now, commands such as SHOW TABLES; will list the tables in this database.
Unfortunately, there is no command to show you which database is your current working
database! Fortunately, it’s always safe to repeat the USE …command; there is no concept
in Hive of nesting of databases.

Recall that we pointed out a useful trick in Variables and Properties for setting a property
to print the current database as part of the prompt (Hive v0.8.0 and later):

hive> set hive.cli.print.current.db=true;

hive (financials)> USE default;

hive (default)> set hive.cli.print.current.db=false;

hive> ...

Finally, you can drop a database:

hive> DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS financials;

The IF EXISTS is optional and suppresses warnings if financials doesn’t exist.

By default, Hive won’t permit you to drop a database if it contains tables. You can either
drop the tables first or append the CASCADE keyword to the command, which will cause
the Hive to drop the tables in the database first:

hive> DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS financials CASCADE;

Using the RESTRICT keyword instead of CASCADE is equivalent to the default behavior,
where existing tables must be dropped before dropping the database.

When a database is dropped, its directory is also deleted.

Alter Database

You can set key-value pairs in the DBPROPERTIES associated with a database using
the ALTER DATABASE command. No other metadata about the database can be changed,
including its name and directory location:
hive> ALTER DATABASE financials SET DBPROPERTIES ('edited-by' = 'Joe Dba');

There is no way to delete or “unset” a DBPROPERTY.

Creating Tables

The CREATE TABLE statement follows SQL conventions, but Hive’s version offers
significant extensions to support a wide range of flexibility where the data files for tables
are stored, the formats used, etc. We discussed many of these options in Text File
Encoding of Data Values . In this section, we describe the other options available for
the CREATE TABLE statement, adapting the employeestable declaration we used
previously in Collection Data Types:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS mydb.employees (

name STRING COMMENT 'Employee name',
salary FLOAT COMMENT 'Employee salary',
subordinates ARRAY<STRING> COMMENT 'Names of subordinates',
deductions MAP<STRING, FLOAT>
COMMENT 'Keys are deductions names, values are percentages',
address STRUCT<street:STRING, city:STRING, state:STRING, zip:INT>
COMMENT 'Home address')
COMMENT 'Description of the table'
TBLPROPERTIES ('creator'='me', 'created_at'='2012-01-02 10:00:00', ...)
LOCATION '/user/hive/warehouse/mydb.db/employees';

First, note that you can prefix a database name, mydb in this case, if you’re not currently
working in the target database.

If you add the option IF NOT EXISTS, Hive will silently ignore the statement if the table
already exists. This is useful in scripts that should create a table the first time they run.

However, the clause has a gotcha you should know. If the schema specified differs from
the schema in the table that already exists, Hive won’t warn you. If your intention is for
this table to have the new schema, you’ll have to drop the old table, losing your data, and
then re-create it. Consider if you should use one or more ALTER TABLE statements to
change the existing table schema instead. See Alter Table for details.

You can add a comment to any column, after the type. Like databases, you can attach a
comment to the table itself and you can define one or more table properties. In most cases,
the primary benefit of TBLPROPERTIES is to add additional documentation in a key-value
format. However, when we examine Hive’s integration with databases such as DynamoDB
(see DynamoDB), we’ll see that the TBLPROPERTIES can be used to express essential
metadata about the database connection.

Hive automatically adds two table properties: last_modified_by holds the username of the
last user to modify the table, and last_modified_time holds the epoch time in seconds of
that modification.

Finally, you can optionally specify a location for the table data (as opposed to metadata,
which the metastore will always hold). In this example, we are showing the default location
that Hive would use,/user/hive/warehouse/mydb.db/employees,
where /user/hive/warehouse is the default “warehouse” location (as discussed
previously), mydb.db is the database directory, and employees is the table directory.

By default, Hive always creates the table’s directory under the directory for the enclosing
database. The exception is the default database. It doesn’t have a directory
under /user/hive/warehouse, so a table in the default database will have its directory
created directly in /user/hive/warehouse (unless explicitly overridden).his version also
accepts the optional LOCATION clause, but note that no other properties, including the
schema, can be defined; they are determined from the original table.

The SHOW TABLES command lists the tables. With no additional arguments, it shows the
tables in the current working database. Let’s assume we have already created a few other
tables, table1 and table2, and we did so in the mydbdatabase:

hive> USE mydb;

hive> SHOW TABLES;
employees
table1
table2

Managed Tables

The tables we have created so far are called managed tables or sometimes called
internal tables, because Hive controls the lifecycle of their data (more or less). As we’ve
seen, Hive stores the data for these tables in a subdirectory under the directory
defined by hive.metastore.warehouse.dir (e.g., /user/hive/warehouse), by default.

When we drop a managed table (see Dropping Tables), Hive deletes the data in the
table.
However, managed tables are less convenient for sharing with other tools. For
example, suppose we have data that is created and used primarily by Pig or other
tools, but we want to run some queries against it, but not give Hive ownership of the
data. We can define an external table that points to that data, but doesn’t take
ownership of it.

External Tables

Suppose we are analyzing data from the stock markets. Periodically, we ingest the data
for NASDAQ and the NYSE from a source like Infochimps
(http://infochimps.com/datasets) and we want to study this data with many tools.
(See the data sets named infochimps_dataset_4777_download_16185 and
infochimps_dataset_4778_download_16677, respectively, which are actually sourced
from Yahoo! Finance.) The schema we’ll use next matches the schemas of both these
data sources. Let’s assume the data files are in the distributed filesystem directory
/data/stocks.

The following table declaration creates an external table that can read all the data files
for this comma-delimited data in /data/stocks:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE IF NOT EXISTS stocks (

exchange STRING,

symbol STRING,

ymd STRING,

price_open FLOAT,

price_high FLOAT,

price_low FLOAT,

price_close FLOAT,

volume INT,

price_adj_close FLOAT)

ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','

LOCATION '/data/stocks';

The EXTERNAL keyword tells Hive this table is external and the LOCATION … clause
is required to tell Hive where it’s located.
 Because it’s external, Hive does not assume it owns the data. Therefore, dropping the
table does not delete the data, although the metadata for the table will be deleted.

There are a few other small differences between managed and external tables, where
some HiveQL constructs are not permitted for external tables. We’ll discuss those
when we come to them.

However, it’s important to note that the differences between managed and external
tables are smaller than they appear at first. Even for managed tables, you know where
they are located, so you can use other tools, hadoop dfs commands, etc., to modify
and even delete the files in the directories for managed tables. Hive may technically
own these directories and files, but it doesn’t have full control over them! Recall, in
Schema on Read, we said that Hive really has no control over the integrity of the files
used for storage and whether or not their contents are consistent with the table
schema. Even managed tables don’t give us this control.

Still, a general principle of good software design is to express intent. If the data is
shared between tools, then creating an external table makes this ownership explicit.

You can tell whether or not a table is managed or external using the output of
DESCRIBE EXTENDED tablename. Near the end of the Detailed Table Information
output, you will see the following for managed tables:

... tableType:MANAGED_TABLE)

For external tables, you will see the following:

... tableType:EXTERNAL_TABLE)

As for managed tables, you can also copy the schema (but not the data) of an existing
table:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE IF NOT EXISTS mydb.employees3

LIKE mydb.employees

LOCATION '/path/to/data';

NOTE

If you omit the EXTERNAL keyword and the original table is external, the new table
will also be external. If you omit EXTERNAL and the original table is managed, the
new table will also be managed. However, if you include the EXTERNAL keyword and
the original table is managed, the new table will be external. Even in this scenario,
the LOCATION clause will still be optional. Managed Tables

The tables we have created so far are called managed tables or sometimes
called internal tables, because Hive controls the lifecycle of their data (more or less). As
we’ve seen, Hive stores the data for these tables in a subdirectory under the directory
defined by hive.metastore.warehouse.dir (e.g.,/user/hive/warehouse), by default.

When we drop a managed table (see Dropping Tables), Hive deletes the data in the table.

However, managed tables are less convenient for sharing with other tools. For example,
suppose we have data that is created and used primarily by Pig or other tools, but we
want to run some queries against it, but not give Hiveownership of the data. We can define
an external table that points to that data, but doesn’t take ownership of it.

External Tables

Suppose we are analyzing data from the stock markets. Periodically, we ingest the data for
NASDAQ and the NYSE from a source like Infochimps (http://infochimps.com/datasets)
and we want to study this data with many tools. (See the data sets
named infochimps_dataset_4777_download_16185and infochimps_dataset_4778_downloa
d_16677, respectively, which are actually sourced from Yahoo! Finance.) The schema we’ll
use next matches the schemas of both these data sources. Let’s assume the data files are
in the distributed filesystem directory /data/stocks.

The following table declaration creates an external table that can read all the data files for
this comma-delimited data in /data/stocks:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE IF NOT EXISTS stocks (

exchange STRING,
symbol STRING,
ymd STRING,
price_open FLOAT,
price_high FLOAT,
price_low FLOAT,
price_close FLOAT,
volume INT,
price_adj_close FLOAT)
ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
LOCATION '/data/stocks';

The EXTERNAL keyword tells Hive this table is external and the LOCATION …clause is
required to tell Hive where it’s located.

Because it’s external, Hive does not assume it owns the data. Therefore, dropping the
table does not delete the data, although the metadata for the table will be deleted.
There are a few other small differences between managed and external tables, where some
HiveQL constructs are not permitted for external tables. We’ll discuss those when we come
to them.

However, it’s important to note that the differences between managed and external tables
are smaller than they appear at first. Even for managed tables, you know where they are
located, so you can use other tools, hadoop dfscommands, etc., to modify and even delete
the files in the directories for managed tables. Hive may technically own these directories
and files, but it doesn’t have full control over them! Recall, in Schema on Read, we said
that Hive really has no control over the integrity of the files used for storage and whether
or not their contents are consistent with the table schema. Even managed tables don’t give
us this control.

Still, a general principle of good software design is to express intent. If the data is shared
between tools, then creating an external table makes this ownership explicit.

You can tell whether or not a table is managed or external using the output of DESCRIBE
EXTENDED tablename. Near the end of the Detailed Table Information output, you will
see the following for managed tables:

... tableType:MANAGED_TABLE)

For external tables, you will see the following:

... tableType:EXTERNAL_TABLE)

As for managed tables, you can also copy the schema (but not the data) of an existing
table:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE IF NOT EXISTS mydb.employees3

LIKE mydb.employees
LOCATION '/path/to/data';

HIVE STORAGE FORMATS

In this post we will take a look on the different Storage File Formats and Record
Formats in Hive
Before we move forward lets discuss for a split second about Apache Hive.

Apache Hive which is a data warehouse system for Hadoop facilitates easy data
summarization, ad-hoc queries, and the analysis of large datasets stored in Hadoop
compatible file systems, first created at Facebook . Hive provide a means to project
structure onto this data and query the data using a SQL-like language called
HiveQL.…read more on Hive here
Among the different storage file formats that are used in hive, the default and simplest
storage file format is the TEXTFILE.
TEXTFILE
The data in a TEXTFILE is stored as plain text, one line per record. The TEXTFILE is very
useful for sharing data with other tools and also when you want to manually edit the data
in the file. However the TEXTFILE is less proficient when compared to the other formats.
SYNTAX :
CREATE TABLE TEXTFILE_TABLE (

COLUMN1 STRING,
COLUMN2 STRING,
COLUMN3 INT,
COLUMN4 INT
) STORED AS TEXTFILE;
SEQUENCE FILE

In sequence files the data is stored in a binary storage format consisting of binary key
value pairs. A complete row is stored as single binary value. Sequence files are more
compact than text and fit well the map-reduce output format. Sequence files do support
block compression and can be compressed on value, or block level, to improve its IO
profile further.

SEQUENCEFILE is a standard format that is supported by Hadoop itself and is good

choice for Hive table storage especially when you want to integrate Hive with other
techonolgies in the Hadoop ecosystem.

The USING sequence file keywords lets you create a sequence File. Here is an example
statement to create a table using sequence File:
CREATE TABLE SEQUENCEFILE_TABLE (
COLUMN1 STRING,
COLUMN2 STRING,
COLUMN3 INT,
COLUMN4 INT
) STORED AS SEQUENCEFILE

Due to the complexity of reading sequence files, they are often only used for “in flight” data
such as intermediate data storage used within a sequence of MapReduce jobs.
RCFILE OR RECORD COLUMNAR FILE
The RCFILE is one more file format that can be used with Hive. The RCFILE stores
columns of a table in a record columnar format rather than row oriented fashion and
provides considerable compression and query performance benefits with highly efficient
storage space utilization. Hive added the RCFile format in version 0.6.0.

RC file format is more useful when tables have large number of columns but only few
columns are typically retrieved.
 The RCFile combines multiple functions to provide the following features
 Fast data storing
 Improved query processing,
 Optimized storage space utilization
 Dynamic data access patterns.
SYNTAX:
CREATE TABLE RCFILE_TABLE (
COLUMN1 STRING,
COLUMN2 STRING,
COLUMN3 INT,
COLUMN4 INT ) STORED AS RCFILE;

Compressed RCFile reduces the IO and storage significantly over text, sequence file, and
row formats. Compression on a column base is more efficient here since it can take
advantage of similarity of the data in a column.

ORC FILE OR OPTIMIZED ROW COLUMNAR FILE

ORCFILE stands for Optimized Row Columnar File and it’s a new Hive File Format that
was created to provide many advantages over the RCFILE format while processing data.
The ORC File format comes with the Hive 0.11 version and cannot be used with previous
versions.
Lightweight indexes are included with ORC file to improve the performance.

Also it uses specific encoders for different column data types to improve compression
further, e.g. variable length compression on integers

ORC stores collections of rows in one file and within the collection the row data is stored
in a columnar format allowing parallel processing of row collections across a cluster.
ORC files compress better than RC files, enabling faster queries. To use it just add
STORED AS orc to the end of your create table statements like this:
CREATE TABLE mytable (
COLUMN1 STRING,
COLUMN2 STRING,
COLUMN3 INT,
COLUMN4 INT
) STORED AS orc;
DEFINING TABLE RECORD FORMATS IN HIVE

The Java technology that Hive uses to process records and map them to column data

types in Hive tables is called SerDe, which is short for SerializerDeserializer. The figure

illustrates how SerDes are leveraged and it will help you understand how Hive keeps file

formats separate from record formats.

So the first thing to notice is the INPUTFORMAT object. INPUTFORMAT allows you to

specify your own Java class should you want Hive to read from a different file

format. STORED AS TEXTFILE is easier than writing INPUTFORMAT

org.apache.hadoop.mapred.TextInputFormat — the whole Java package tree and class

name for the default text file input format object, in other words.

The same is true of the OUTPUTFORMAT object. Instead of writing out the whole Java

package tree and class name, the STORED AS TEXTFILE statement takes care of all of

that for you.

Hive allows you to separate your record format from your file format, so how exactly do

you accomplish this? Simple, you either replace STORED AS TEXTFILE with something

like STORED AS RCFILE, or you can create your own Java class and specify the input and

output classes using INPUTFORMAT packagepath.classname and OUTPUTFORMAT

packagepath.classname.

Finally notice that when Hive is reading data from the HDFS (or local file system), a Java

Deserializer formats the data into a record that maps to table column data types. This

would characterize the data flow for a HiveQL SELECTstatement. When Hive is writing

data, a Java Serializer accepts the record Hive uses and translates it such that

the OUTPUTFORMAT class can write it to the HDFS (or local file system).

This would characterize the data flow for a HiveQL CREATE-TABLE-AS-

SELECT statement. So the INPUTFORMAT, OUTPUTFORMAT and SerDe objects allow

Hive to separate the table record format from the table file format.
Hive bundles a number of SerDes for you to choose from, and you’ll find a larger number

available from third parties if you search online. You can also develop your own SerDes if

you have a more unusual data type that you want to manage with a Hive table. (Possible

examples here are video data and e-mail data.)

In the following list, some of the SerDes provided with Hive are described as well as one

third-party option that you may find useful.

 LazySimpleSerDe: The default SerDe that’s used with the TEXTFILE format; it

would be used with our_first_table from the following listing.

 (A) $ $HIVE_HOME/bin hive --service cli

 (B) hive> set hive.cli.print.current.db=true;
 (C) hive (default)> CREATE DATABASE ourfirstdatabase;
 OK
 Time taken: 3.756 seconds
 (D) hive (default)> USE ourfirstdatabase;
 OK
 Time taken: 0.039 seconds
 (E) hive (ourfirstdatabase)> CREATE TABLE our_first_table (
 > FirstName STRING,
 > LastName STRING,
 > EmployeeId INT);
 OK
 Time taken: 0.043 seconds
 hive (ourfirstdatabase)> quit;
 (F) $ ls /home/biadmin/Hive/warehouse/ourfirstdatabase.db

our_first_table

It also would be used with data_types_table from the following listing.

$ ./hive --service cli

hive> CREATE DATABASE data_types_db;
OK
Time taken: 0.119 seconds
hive> USE data_types_db;
OK
Time taken: 0.018 seconds
(1)Hive> CREATE TABLE data_types_table (
(2) > our_tinyint TINYINT COMMENT '1 byte signed integer',
(3) > our_smallint SMALLINT COMMENT '2 byte signed integer',
(4) > our_int INT COMMENT '4 byte signed integer',
(5) > our_bigint BIGINT COMMENT '8 byte signed integer',
(6) > our_float FLOAT COMMENT 'Single precision floating point',
(7) > our_double DOUBLE COMMENT 'Double precision floating point',
(8) > our_decimal DECIMAL COMMENT 'Precise decimal type based
(9) > on Java BigDecimal Object',
(10) > our_timestamp TIMESTAMP COMMENT 'YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.fffffffff"
(11) > (9 decimal place precision)',
(12) > our_boolean BOOLEAN COMMENT 'TRUE or FALSE boolean data type',
(13) > our_string STRING COMMENT 'Character String data type',
(14) > our_binary BINARY COMMENT 'Data Type for Storing arbitrary
(15) > number of bytes',
(16) > our_array ARRAY<TINYINT> COMMENT 'A collection of fields all of
(17) > the same data type indexed BY
(18) > an integer',
(19) > our_map MAP<STRING,INT> COMMENT 'A Collection of Key,Value Pairs
(20) > where the Key is a Primitive
(21) > Type and the Value can be
(22) > anything. The chosen data
(23) > types for the keys and values
(24) > must remain the same per map',
(25) > our_struct STRUCT<first : SMALLINT, second : FLOAT, third : STRING>
(26) > COMMENT 'A nested complex data
(27) > structure',
(28) > our_union UNIONTYPE<INT,FLOAT,STRING>
(29) > COMMENT 'A Complex Data Type that can
(30) > hold One of its Possible Data
(31) > Types at Once')
(32) > COMMENT 'Table illustrating all Apache Hive data types'
(33) > ROW FORMAT DELIMITED
(34) > FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
(35) > COLLECTION ITEMS TERMINATED BY '|'
(36) > MAP KEYS TERMINATED BY '^'
(37) > LINES TERMINATED BY 'n'
 (38) > STORED AS TEXTFILE
(39) > TBLPROPERTIES ('creator'='Bruce Brown', 'created_at'='Sat Sep 21 20:46:32
EDT 2013');
OK
Time taken: 0.886 seconds

 ColumnarSerDe: Used with the RCFILE format.

 RegexSerDe: The regular expression SerDe, which ships with Hive to enable the

parsing of text files, RegexSerDe can form a powerful approach for building

structured data in Hive tables from unstructured blogs, semi-structured log files, e-

mails, tweets, and other data from social media. Regular expressions allow you to

extract meaningful information (an e-mail address, for example) with HiveQL from

an unstructured or semi-structured text document incompatible with traditional

SQL and RDBMSs.

 HBaseSerDe: Included with Hive to enables it to integrate with HBase. You can

store Hive tables in HBase by leveraging this SerDe.

 JSONSerDe: A third-party SerDe for reading and writing JSON data records with

Hive. You can quickly find (via Google and GitHub) two JSON SerDes by searching

online for the phrase json serde for hive.

 AvroSerDe: Included with Hive so that you can read and write Avro data in Hive

tables.

Hive DML Commands

DML refers to "Data Manipulation Language", a subset of SQL statements that modify the
data stored in tables. Because Impala focuses on query performance and leverages the
append-only nature of HDFS storage, currently Impala only supports a small set of DML
statements:

 INSERT Statement
 LOAD DATA Statement

INSERT in Impala is primarily optimized for inserting large volumes of data in a single
statement, to make effective use of the multi-megabyte HDFS blocks. This is the way in
Impala to create new data files. If you intend to insert one or a few rows at a time, such as
using the INSERT ... VALUES syntax, that technique is much more efficient for Impala
tables stored in HBase. See Using Impala to Query HBase Tables for details.

LOAD DATA moves existing data files into the directory for an Impala table, making them
immediately available for Impala queries. This is one way in Impala to work with data files
 produced by other Hadoop components. (CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE is the other
alternative; with external tables, you can query existing data files, while the files remain in
their original location.)

To simulate the effects of an UPDATE or DELETE statement in other database systems,

typically you use INSERT or CREATE TABLE AS SELECT to copy data from one table to
another, filtering out or changing the appropriate rows during the copy operation.

Although Impala currently does not have an UPDATE statement, you can achieve a similar
result by using Impala tables stored in HBase. When you insert a row into an HBase table,
and the table already contains a row with the same value for the key column, the older row
is hidden, effectively the same as a single-row UPDATE.

To understand the Hive DML commands, let's see the employee and employee_department
table first.

LOAD DATA

1. hive> LOAD DATA LOCAL INPATH './usr/Desktop/kv1.txt' OVERWRITE INTO TABLE Emp
loyee;

SELECTS and FILTERS

1. hive> SELECT E.EMP_ID FROM Employee E WHERE E.Address='US';

GROUP BY

1. hive> hive> SELECT E.EMP_ID FROM Employee E GROUP BY E.Addresss;

Hive sort by and order by commands are used to fetch data in sorted order. The main
differences between sort by and order by commands are given below.

Sort by

1. hive> SELECT E.EMP_ID FROM Employee E SORT BY E.empid;

May use multiple reducers for final output.

Only guarantees ordering of rows within a reducer.

May give partially ordered result.

 Order by

1. hive> SELECT E.EMP_ID FROM Employee E order BY E.empid;

Uses single reducer to guarantee total order in output.

LIMIT can be used to minimize sort time.

Hive Join

Let's see two tables Employee and EmployeeDepartment that are going to be joined.

Inner joins

1. Select * from employee join employeedepartment ON (employee.empid=employeedepartm

ent.empId)

Output : <<InnerJoin.png>>

Left outer joins

1. Select e.empId, empName, department from employee e Left outer join employeedepartme
nt ed on(e.empId=ed.empId);

Output : <<LeftOuterJoin.png>>

Right outer joins

1. Select e.empId, empName, department from employee e Right outer join employeedepartm
ent ed on(e.empId=ed.empId);

Full outer joins

1. Select e.empId, empName, department from employee e FULL outer join employeedepartm
ent ed on(e.empId

Important questions

Unit-II
 1. what is GFS? wxplain with neat diagram?
2. Explain the Building Blocks of HDFS(Name Node,Data Node,Job
Tracker,TaskTracker,Sec Name Node) with neat diagram?(VVVVVVVV IMP)
3. write notes on configuration of XML Files in Hadoop?

UNIT 3 IMP Questions

1. what are the difference between MR1 and MR2?
2. with an example explain driver code,mapper code,reducer code in hadoop?
3. what is the significance of combiner and partioner class in hadoop?
4. MapReduce Program: To find average temperature for each year in NCDC data
set.?
Data avilable at https://github.com/tomwhite/hadoop-
book/tree/master/input/ncdc/all.

UNIT 4 IMP Questions

1. What are the various Writable interfaces in Hadoop?
2. what happen when there is no WritableComparable interface in Hadoop?
3. write short notes on the following data types in Hadoop?

 Writable wrappers for Java primitives

 Text,
 BytesWritable,
 NullWritable,
 ObjectWritable
 GenericWritable,
 Writable collections,
4. How to speed up the MapReduce process with RawComparator?

UNIT 5 IMP Questions

1. Explain Pig architecture in detail with neat diagram?
2. what is the difference between Hive and ApachePig?
3. what is the difference between MapReduce and ApachePig?
4. Apache Pig Scripting Statements and data type...?

UNIT 6 IMP Questions

1. Explain Hive architecture in detail with neat diagram?
2. How the WorkFlow will happen Between Hive and Hadoop?
3. What is the difference between Hive and ApachePig?
4. Write the java and Hive Script for the following?

 create database
 select statement
 for each statement
 order by statement
 alter table statement
 Drop table statement