Using built-in functions

There are various built-in functions available in Hive that can be used in queries for executing various operations. These functions are used to extract or manipulate data in Hive tables.

Built-in functions are divided into the following categories:

• Mathematical functions

• Collection functions

• Type conversion functions

• Date functions

• String functions

• Conditional functions

• Miscellaneous functions

How to do it…

In the following sections, a few built-in functions are explained.

Mathematical functions

Hive supports various functions to run some mathematical operations on field values. There are a large number of mathematical functions available in Hive that can be used in queries. Most of the mathematical functions are the same as supported in RDBMS:

Function Name	Return Type	Description
abs(DOUBLE x)	DOUBLE	It will return an absolute value of x.
acos(DOUBLE x), acos(DECIMAL x)	DOUBLE	It will return an arc cosine value of x if the value of x is equal to or between -1 and...