Using the built-in User Defined Table Function (UDTF)

Normal functions take one row as input and provide one row as transformed output. On the other side, built-in table-generating functions take one row as input and produce multiple output rows.

How to do it…

The built-in table-generating functions could be used directly in the query. The following are some examples of the table-generating functions available in Hive:

Function Name	Return Type	Description
explode(ARRAY)	N rows	It will return n of rows where n is the size of an array. This function represents each element of an array as a row.
explode(MAP)	N rows	It will return n number of rows where n is the size of a map. This function represents each key-value element of the map as a row containing two columns: one for key and another for value.
inline(ARRAY<STRUCT[,STRUCT]>)		It is used to explode an array of struct elements into a table.
json_tuple(jsonStr, k1, k2, ...)	tuple	It is used to extract a set of keys from...