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- What it is
- A data warehouse layer over Apache Hadoop that lets you query files with SQL-like HiveQL instead of writing MapReduce or Apache Spark code.
- The metastore
- Hive keeps a metastore of table definitions — schema, partitions, file locations — that other engines read.
- On AWS, the AWS Glue Data Catalog is the managed, shared replacement for the Hive metastore, and is Hive-metastore-compatible.
- Where it runs on AWS
- Amazon EMR, alongside Spark and Presto on the same cluster.
- Not to be confused with
- Amazon Athena — serverless SQL over S3 with no cluster at all. Hive needs a cluster; it suits long-running batch SQL rather than ad hoc queries.