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SerDe is short for Serializer/Deserializer. A SerDe allows Hive to read in data from a table, and write it back out to HDFS in any custom format. Anyone can write their own SerDe for their own data formats.

See Hive SerDe for an introduction to SerDes. For HiveQL specifying SerDes and their properties, see Create Table (particularly Row Format, Storage Format, and SerDe) and Alter Table (Add SerDe Properties).

Built-in SerDes

• Avro (Hive 0.9.1 and later)
• ORC (Hive 0.11 and later)
• RegEx
• Thrift
• Parquet (Hive 0.13 and later)

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