Apache Hive offers a read-only SQL dialect, so in that sense, it exposes the non-standard SQL-ish interface of a relational database but an OLAP type, not an OLTP type. It supports multiple sources of data, typically distributed systems in the big data space. It is designed for batched long-running analytical queries that can spawn a map-reduce job.
Also, watch this video on Hive to understand more:
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