How Hive works

Hive databases are comprised of tables which are made up of partitions. Data can be accessed via a simple query language and Hive supports overwriting or appending of data. Within a particular database, data in tables is serialized and each table has a corresponding HDFS directory. Each table can be sub-divided into partitions that determine how data is distributed within subdirectories of the table directory. Data within partitions can be further broken down into buckets.