Hive data model management

Hive handles data in the following four ways:

• Hive tables
• Hive table partition
• Hive partition bucketing
• Hive views

We will see each one of them in detail in the following sections.

Hive tables

A Hive table is very similar to any RDBMS table. The table is divided into rows and columns. Each column (field) is defined with a proper name and datatype. We have already seen all the available datatypes in Hive in the Supported datatypes section. A Hive table is divided into two types:

• Managed tables
• External tables

We will learn about both of these types in the following sections.

Managed tables

The following is a sample command to define a Hive managed table:

Create Table < managed_table_name>  
   Column1 <data type>, 
   Column2 <data type>, 
   Column3 <data type> 
Row format delimited Fields Terminated by "t"; 

When the preceding query is executed, Hive creates the table and the metadata is updated in the metastore accordingly. But the table is empty. So...