Apache Hive is a software program for data warehouse applications that seek to harness petabyte-scale datasets. It allows for the fast reading, writing, and managing of data on a big data scale, including the ability to project structure onto unstructured datasets that are already in storage. Hive has thus become an important tool to enable data scientists and data engineers to conduct typical data warehousing activities like extract/transform/load (ETL), reporting, and data analysis with today’s extraordinarily large and complex datasets.
While Hive allows for the use of an SQL interface for queries similar to those used by traditional, centralized database management systems (DMBS), it is built to work with distributed file systems that integrate with the popular, open-source Apache Hadoop framework. Thus, it offers maximum scalability, performance, fault tolerance, and loose-coupling with input formats, and works with other programs in the Apache ecosystem like Apache Spark and MapReduce.‎