What is Hive? Is Hive a database?

Question

I am new to Hive. I found it similar to RDBMS like tables, joins, partitions. According to my understanding Hive uses HDFS for storing data and it provides SQL abstraction over HDFS. Is Hive a database over HDFS like HBase, or is it a querying tool over HDFS.

But I doubt that Hive is a query language, as it has tables, joins & partitions.

Answer 1

No, we cannot call Apache Hive a relational database, as it is a data warehouse that is built on top of Apache Hadoop for providing data summarization, query and, analysis. It differs from a relational database in a way that it stores schema in a database and processed data into HDFS.

For processing, Hive provides a SQL-like interface to query data stored in various databases and file systems that integrate with Hadoop. It supports HiveQL(Hive Query Language), which automatically translates SQL-like queries into MapReduce jobs executed on Hadoop.

Hive is read-based and therefore not support transaction processing that typically involves a high percentage of write operations. It is best suited for batch jobs like weblog processing and is designed for OLAP workloads.