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Up until Hive 0.13, atomicity, consistency, and durability were provided at the partition level. Isolation could be provided by turning on one of the available locking mechanisms (ZooKeeper or in memory). With the addition of transactions in Hive 0.13 it is now possible to provide full ACID semantics at the row level, so that one application can add rows while another reads from the same partition without interfering with each other.
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