Introduction to Hive

Hive is an essential tool in the Hadoop ecosystem that provides an SQL (Structured Query Language) dialect for querying data stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Most data warehouse applications are implemented using relational databases that use SQL as the query language. Hive lowers the barrier for moving these applications to Hadoop. People who know SQL can learn Hive easily. Hive also allows programmers familiar with the MapReduce framework to plug in their custom mappers and reducers to perform more sophisticated analysis that may not be supported by the built-in capabilities of the language.