ACID operations

Apache Hive supports ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) v2 transactions at the row level without any configuration. Knowing what this support entails helps you determine the table type you create.

By default, managed tables are ACID tables. You cannot disable ACID transactions on managed tables, but you can change the Hive default behavior to create external tables by default to mimic legacy releases. Application development and operations are simplified with strong transactional guarantees and simple semantics for SQL commands. You do not need to bucket ACID v2 tables, so maintenance is easier. With improvements in transactional semantics, advanced optimizations, such as materialized view rewrites and automatic query cache, are available. With these optimizations, you can deploy new Hive application types.

A Hive operation is atomic. The operation either succeeds completely or fails; it does not result in partial data. A Hive operation is also consistent: After an application performs an operation, the results are visible to the application in every subsequent operation. Hive operations are isolated. Your operations do not cause unexpected side effects for other users. Finally, a Hive operation is durable. A completed operation is preserved in the event of a failure.

Hive operations are atomic at the row level instead of the table or partition level. A Hive client can read from a partition at the same time another client adds rows to the partition. Transaction streaming rapidly inserts data into Hive tables and partitions.