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Interview Questions - Hive and Querying

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Interview Questions - Hive and Querying

Uploaded by

Junaid Sheikh
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Interview Questions - Hive and Querying

1. Explain ORDER BY, CLUSTER BY, SORT BY and DISTRIBUTE BY in brief.


Answer. Both ​ORDER BY ​and SORT BY ​are ​used for sorting query results in ascending
or descending order. ​However, one of the differences between them is the way they
sort results​. ​ORDER BY sorts the entire data using a reducer, whereas ​SORT BY
does not guarantee overall sorting of data. There may be overlapping data and it
might need more than one reducer.

Both ​DISTRIBUTE BY and ​CLUSTER BY are used for categorising query results
on the basis of one or more columns. ​CLUSTER BY is a shortcut for both
DISTRIBUTE BY​and ​SORT BY​. Hive uses the columns in DISTRIBUTE BY to
distribute the rows among the reducers. All rows with the same ​DISTRIBUTE BY
columns will go to the same reducer. However, ​DISTRIBUTE BY ​does not
guarantee clustering or sorting of properties.

2. Explain the difference between External and Internal tables.


Answer. External Table: ​Unlike RDBMSes where data and tables are tightly coupled,
data in External Tables is loosely coupled. External Tables reside in HDFS. Even
if you drop an external table in Hive, the data mapped to it remains intact inside
HDFS.

Internal Table: ​An Internal Table in Hive is similar to the tables in RDBMSes.
The data and the table schema are tightly coupled in internal tables. If you drop
an internal table in Hive, the data stored in it will get deleted.

3. In which scenarios do you use external tables?


Answer. We use external tables in the following scenarios:
1. When we need to store data in a custom location
2. Unlike Internal tables, if we delete external tables, they still continue to
reside in HDFS
3. Data from external tables should not be owned by Hive

4. Is Hive a database or a data warehouse? What are the key differences


between Hive and RDBMSes?
Answer. Hive is a data warehouse. The key difference between Hive and RDBMSes is
that an RDBMS is a traditional database where you can store only a limited
amount of data, whereas Hive is a data warehouse where you can store data in
bulk and also perform data analysis.

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5. What type of Read and Write operations take place in Hive?
Answer. READ​ Many, ​WRITE​ Once

6. What are the instances where you can use Indexing?


Answer. The key instances where you can use indexing are as follows:
1. When the data set is large
2. When faster query execution is needed
3. For columns that are used more frequently than others
4. For read-heavy applications, where you need to read the data more
frequently

7. Differentiate between Hive and HBase.


Answer.
Hive HBase

Hive is a ‘data warehouse software’ HBase is a distributed data store built


that enables you to query and on top of HDFS, and it can leverage
manipulate data using an SQL-like all the benefits provided by Hadoop or
language known as HiveQL. HDFS.

Hive abstracts the programming HBase does not have a native


complexity of MapReduce and data-processing engine and relies on
provides a simple SQL-like language Map-Reduce and Spark APIs for data
known as HiveQL for querying data processing.
sets.

Hive has a relational DBMS data HBase has a columnar data model.
model.

Apache Hive has high latency as HBase provides a random and fast
compared with HBase. Hence, it is not lookup on top of HDFS, which allows
preferred for looking up individual a user to query for individual records.
records.

8. Can Hive be used as an OLTP system like MySQL?

Answer​. Hive does not support insert and update functions at a row-level, which makes it
unsuitable for OLTP systems. ​Note: OLTP is an online transaction-processing
system that involves ​INSERT​, ​UPDATE​ and ​DELETE ​operations.

9. What are the limitations of Hive?


Answer. Some limitations of Hive are as follows:

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● Hive does not support insert and update functions at a row-level, which
makes it unsuitable for OLTP systems.
● Hive does not support real-time processing.
● Hive queries have high latency due to the start-up overhead of the
MapReduce job.
10. How does Hive improve performance with tables in ORC format?
Answer. Using the ORC format leads to a reduction in the size of the data stored, as this
file format has high compression ratios. As the data size is reduced, the time to
read and write the data is also reduced. The ORC format improves query
performance also by the way it stores data in a file. Data is stored in a columnar
format and columns that are not needed in a query can be skipped, thus leading
to better performance.

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