HBase supports several interfaces to access data in its tables, such as the following:
HBase Shell
Java Client API
REST, Thrift, and Avro
HBase Shell is straightforward, but a little too simple to perform complex queries on. Other interfaces need programming, which is not suitable for ad hoc queries.
As data keeps growing, people might want an easy way to analyze the large amount of data stored in HBase. The analysis should be efficient, ad hoc, and it should not require programming. Hive is currently the best approach for this purpose.
Hive is a data warehouse infrastructure built for Hadoop. Hive is used for ad hoc querying, and analyzing a large data set without having to write a MapReduce program. Hive supports a SQL-like query language called HiveQL (HQL) to access data in its table.
We can integrate HBase and Hive, so that we can use HQL statements to access HBase tables, both to read and write.
In this recipe, we will describe how...
