Storing and processing Hive data in the RC file format

I'm sure that most of the time, you would have created Hive tables and stored data in a text format; in this recipe, we are going to store data in RC files.

Getting ready

To perform this recipe, you should have a running Hadoop cluster as well as the latest version of Hive installed on it. Here, I am going to use Hive 1.2.1.

How to do it...

Hive 1.2.1 supports different types of files, which help process data in a fast manner. In this recipe, we are going to use RC files to store data in Hive. To store data in RC files, we first need to create a Hive table that stores this data in a textual format. We will use the same table that we created in the first recipe.

Creating a table to store RCFILE is very easy, as shown here:

create table employee_rc(
id int, name string)
row format delimited
fields terminated by '|'
stored as RCFILE;

To insert data into the table from our text table, we need to execute the following query, which...