Hive Thrift client
Assumptions made: you know what Hive is, you know what Thrift is and you know how to install and start the Hive Thrift server.
To query the Hive server in a language that doesn’t run on the Java Virtual Machine and therefore can’t easily make use of the JBDC drivers, you will need to generate a Thrift client library in your chosen language to use the Thrift Server; as long Thrift has generators for your language of course.
I couldn’t find much documentation online on exactly how to go about this, therefore I thought I’d document the steps I took to generate the Ruby thrift client for Hive, in case someone somewhere wanted to do the same:
- Install Thrift
- Get the Hive thrift files by downloading the Hive source code using one of the methods described here: http://hadoop.apache.org/hive/version_control.html
- Then run the following commands, replacing ‘rb’ with the language of your choice
cd PATH_TO_HIVE_SOURCE_CODE
thrift —gen rb -I service/include metastore/if/hive_metastore.thrift
thrift —gen rb -I service/include -I . service/if/hive_service.thrift
thrift —gen rb service/include/thrift/fb303/if/fb303.thrift
thrift —gen rb serde/if/serde.thrift
thrift —gen rb ql/if/queryplan.thrift
thrift —gen rb service/include/thrift/if/reflection_limited.thrift
- Your thrift client will be in the folder: PATH_TO_HIVE_SOURCE_CODE/gen-rb (again replace rb in the generated folder name with your language)
- You can now copy the generated code around and start using the library to connect with your Hive server
In Ruby you would use the generated code as follows:
Or you could use our Ruby thrift client library, we’ve written a thin layer on top of the thrift code to make things a little easier. Feel free to browse and download the code from here: http://github.com/forward/rbhive
