About Hive

Apache Hive is a powerful data warehousing application for Hadoop. It enables you to access your data using Hive QL, a language similar to SQL.

Install Hive on your client machine(s) from which you submit jobs; you do not need to install it on the nodes in your Hadoop cluster. As of CDH 5, Hive supports HCatalog which must be installed separately.

HiveServer2

HiveServer2 is an improved version of HiveServer that supports a Thrift API tailored for JDBC and ODBC clients, Kerberos authentication, and multi-client concurrency. The CLI for HiveServer2 is Beeline.

Transaction (ACID) Support in Hive

Hive in CDH does not support transactions (HIVE-5317). Currently, transaction support in Hive is an experimental feature that only works with the ORC file format. Cloudera recommends using the Parquet file format, which works across many tools. Merge updates in Hive tables using existing functionality, including statements such as INSERT, INSERT OVERWRITE, and CREATE TABLE AS SELECT.