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Hive is designed to enable easy data summarization, ad-hoc querying and analysis of large volumes of data. It provides SQL which enables users to do ad-hoc querying, summarization and data analysis easily. At the same time, Hive's SQL gives users multiple places to integrate their own functionality to do custom analysis, such as User Defined Functions (UDFs).
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In the following sections we provide a tutorial on the capabilities of the system. We start by describing the concepts of data types, tables, and partitions (which are very similar to what you would find in a traditional relational DBMS) and then illustrate the capabilities of Hive SQL with Hive with the help of some examples.
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