Hive Features in HPE Data Fabric

Describes HPE Data Fabric-specific features in Hive.

Removing Temporary Hive Files

Starting from EEP 8.1.0, EEP 7.1.2, and EEP 6.3.6, to remove the temporary Hive files created during the Hive session, set the value of hive.scratchdir.lock property to true on hive-site.xml file.
<property> 
   <name>hive.scratchdir.lock</name> 
   <value>true</value> 
</property>

For the previous EEP versions, manually remove the temporary Hive files that are not used by the active Hive sessions.

You have two different situations:

  • If you have configured the HiveServer2 in a node, set hive.scratchdir.lock property on the hive-site.xml file to automatically remove the temporary Hive files.

  • If you have not configured the HiveServer2 in a node, set the hive.scratchdir.lock property and run the following command to remove the temporary Hive files.
    hive --service cleardanglingscratchdir

Symbolic Link Support in Hive

Starting from EEP 7.1.0, all hadoop fs commands support operations on symlinks (symbolic links). Hive supports symlinks in EEP 8.0.0 onwards. You can create symlinks through the command line interface or file system API (MapRFileSystem.java).
Symlink creation via CLI has the following requirements:
Creating Symlinks
The following examples demonstrate how to create symbolic links via CLI and MapRFileSystem API:
  • Create a relative symlink via CLI:
    ln -rs /mountPoint/path/to/file /mountPoint/path/to/symlink
  • Create an absolute symlink via CLI:
    ln -s /mountPoint/path/to/file /mountPoint/path/to/symlink
  • Create a symlink via MapRFileSystem API:
    MapRFileSystem maprFS = MapRFileSystem.get(new Configuration()); 
maprFS.createSymlink(pathToTarget, pathToLink, createParentFlag);
Using Symlinks for Hive Operations
Once a symlink is created, you can use the symlink for Hive operations, such as table location and data file, as demonstrated in the following steps:
  1. Create a table directory:
    mkdir /mapr/my.cluster.com/user/hive/warehouse/ext_tbl_symlink
  2. Create a symlink from a data source to a table location:
    ln -s /mapr/my.cluster.com/user/mapr/source_files/data.txt /mapr/my.cluster.com/user/hive/warehouse/ext_tbl_mh120/data_link.txt
  3. Create an external Hive table in the ext_tbl_symlink directory (created in step 1): 
    CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE file_link_table (...) ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY "," STORED AS TEXTFILE LOCATION '/user/hive/warehouse/ext_tbl_symlink';
The Hive table has a symbolically linked text file as the data source. Data can be processed as if it is a regular data file.
Configuring Symlinks Support

When you have many small files and you are using symlinks, the performance of Hive operations are slower.

To enable or disable the symlink support, configure the hive.sym.link.support.enabled property in hive-site.xml file.

<property>
    <name>hive.sym.link.support.enabled</name>
    <value>false</value>
    <description>Enables or disables symlink support in Hive. Enabling this functionality leads to verification of each files and folders to be a symlink which results in slower performance when there are many small files to process.</description>
</property>

The value of this property is set to false by default. To enable the symlink support, set the value to true and restart Hive services.