Understanding HBase Snapshots

When an HBase snapshot exists for an HBase table which a Hive table references, you can choose to execute queries over the “offline” snapshot for that table instead of the table itself.

First, set the property to the name of the HBase snapshot in your Hive script: `set hive.hbase.snapshot.name=my_snapshot`. A temporary directory is required to run the query over the snapshot. By default, a directory is chosen inside of “/tmp” in HDFS, but this can be overridden by using the property “hive.hbase.snapshot.restoredir”.