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You can install a stable release of Hive by downloading and unpacking a tarball, or you can download the source code and build Hive using Maven (release 0.13 and later) or Ant (release 0.12 and earlier).

Hive installation has these requirements:

• Java 1.6 or 1.7
• Hadoop 0.20.x, 0.23.x, or 2.0.x-alpha

Installing from a Tarball

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Moreover, we strongly advise users to create the HDFS directories /tmp and /user/hive/warehouse (also known as hive.metastore.warehouse.dir) and set them chmod g+w before tables are created in Hive.

Next Steps

You can begin using Hive as soon as it is installed, although you will probably want to configure it first.

Hive CLI and Beeline CLI

To use the Hive command line interface (cliCLI) go to the Hive home directory and execute the following command:

$ bin/hive

The Hive home directory (the is the one with the contents of build/dist ) and for Hive 0.12 and earlier; for Hive 0.13 and later it is packaging/target/apache-hive-<release_string>-bin/apache-hive-<release_string>-bin/.

HiveServer2 (introduced in Hive 0.11) has a new CLI called Beeline (see Beeline – New Command Line Shell). To use Beeline, execute the following command in the Hive home directory:

$ bin/hive
beeline

Hive Metastore

Metadata is stored in an embedded Derby database whose disk storage location is determined by the Hive configuration variable named javax.jdo.option.ConnectionURL. By default, this location is ./metastore_db (see conf/hive-default.xml).

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Next Step: Configuring Hive.

HCatalog and WebHCat

HCatalog

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