Storing and processing Hive data in a sequential 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 sequential 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 various different types of files, which help process data in a faster manner. In this recipe, we are going to use sequential files to store data in Hive. To store data in sequential files, we first need to create a Hive table that stores the data in a textual format:

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

The preceding statement will create a table in Hive along with the employee name. Now, let's load data into this table:

load data local inpath '/usr/local/hive/examples/files/employee.dat' into table...