src/docs/user/hive.txt

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Importing Data Into Hive
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Sqoop's import tool's main function is to upload your data into files
in HDFS. If you have a Hive metastore associated with your HDFS
cluster, Sqoop can also import the data into Hive by generating and
executing a +CREATE TABLE+ statement to define the data's layout in
Hive. Importing data into Hive is as simple as adding the
*+\--hive-import+* option to your Sqoop command line.

If the Hive table already exists, you can specify the
*+\--hive-overwrite+* option to indicate that existing table in hive must
be replaced. After your data is imported into HDFS or this step is
omitted, Sqoop will generate a Hive script containing a +CREATE TABLE+
operation defining your columns using Hive's types, and a +LOAD DATA INPATH+
statement to move the data files into Hive's warehouse directory.

The script can be executed in two ways:

- By the default the script will be executed by calling
the installed copy of hive on the machine where Sqoop is run. If you have
multiple Hive installations, or +hive+ is not in your +$PATH+, use the
*+\--hive-home+* option to identify the Hive installation directory.
Sqoop will use +$HIVE_HOME/bin/hive+ from here.

- If the user specifies the *+\--hs2-url+* parameter then the script will
 be sent to HiveServer2 through a JDBC connection. Note that the data itself
 will not be transferred via the JDBC connection it is written directly to HDFS
 just like in case of the default hive import. As HiveServer2 provides proper
 authorization and auditing features it is recommended to use this instead of
 the default. Currently only Kerberos authentication and text file format is
 supported with this option.

NOTE: This function is incompatible with +\--as-avrodatafile+ and
+\--as-sequencefile+.

Even though Hive supports escaping characters, it does not
handle escaping of new-line character. Also, it does not support
the notion of enclosing characters that may include field delimiters
in the enclosed string.  It is therefore recommended that you choose
unambiguous field and record-terminating delimiters without the help
of escaping and enclosing characters when working with Hive; this is
due to limitations of Hive's input parsing abilities. If you do use
+\--escaped-by+, +\--enclosed-by+, or +\--optionally-enclosed-by+ when
importing data into Hive, Sqoop will print a warning message.

Hive will have problems using Sqoop-imported data if your database's
rows contain string fields that have Hive's default row delimiters
(+\n+ and +\r+ characters) or column delimiters (+\01+ characters)
present in them.  You can use the +\--hive-drop-import-delims+ option
to drop those characters on import to give Hive-compatible text data.
Alternatively, you can use the +\--hive-delims-replacement+ option
to replace those characters with a user-defined string on import to give
Hive-compatible text data.  These options should only be used if you use
Hive's default delimiters and should not be used if different delimiters
are specified.

Sqoop will pass the field and record delimiters through to Hive. If you do
not set any delimiters and do use +\--hive-import+, the field delimiter will
be set to +^A+ and the record delimiter will be set to +\n+ to be consistent
with Hive's defaults.

Sqoop will by default import NULL values as string +null+. Hive is however
using string +\N+ to denote +NULL+ values and therefore predicates dealing
with +NULL+ (like +IS NULL+) will not work correctly. You should append
parameters +\--null-string+ and +\--null-non-string+ in case of import job or
+--input-null-string+ and +--input-null-non-string+ in case of an export job if
you wish to properly preserve +NULL+ values. Because sqoop is using those
parameters in generated code, you need to properly escape value +\N+ to +\\N+:

----
$ sqoop import  ... --null-string '\\N' --null-non-string '\\N'
----

The table name used in Hive is, by default, the same as that of the
source table. You can control the output table name with the +\--hive-table+
option.

Hive can put data into partitions for more efficient query
performance.  You can tell a Sqoop job to import data for Hive into a
particular partition by specifying the +\--hive-partition-key+ and
+\--hive-partition-value+ arguments.  The partition value must be a
string.  Please see the Hive documentation for more details on
partitioning.

You can import compressed tables into Hive using the +\--compress+ and
+\--compression-codec+ options. One downside to compressing tables imported
into Hive is that many codecs cannot be split for processing by parallel map
tasks. The lzop codec, however, does support splitting. When importing tables
with this codec, Sqoop will automatically index the files for splitting and
configuring a new Hive table with the correct InputFormat. This feature
currently requires that all partitions of a table be compressed with the lzop
codec.