New Book Review: "Practical Hive"
New book review for Practical Hive: A Guide to Hadoop's Data Warehouse System, by Scott Shaw, Andreas Francois Vermeulen, Ankur Gupta, and David Kjerrumgaard, Apress, 2016:
Shaw comments about the moment he experienced when he first copied a file into HDFS and created a Hive table on top of the file. "I was blown away by the simplicity of the solution yet by the far-reaching impact it would have on data analytics. Since that first simple beginning, I have seen data projects using Hive go from design to real analytic value built in weeks, which would take months with traditional approaches. Hive and the greater Hadoop ecosystem is truly a game-changer for data driven companies and for companies who need answers to critical business questions. The purpose of this book is the hope that it will provide to you the same 'ah-ha' moment I experienced. The purpose is to give you the foundation to explore and experience what Hive and Hadoop have to offer and to help you begin your journey into the technology that will drive innovation for the next decade or more. To survive in the technology field, you must constantly reinvent yourself. Technology is constantly traveling forward. Right now there is a train departing; welcome aboard."
As a long-time technologist, I was certainly aware of Hive, but it wasn't clear to me what the component had to offer as it can be challenging to find satisfying explanations on the web. The liberal use of the term "Hive tables" by bloggers was especially confusing, not to mention the incomplete explanations that I was hearing from other technologists. Experiencing my own "ah-ha" moment, this book cleared everything up for me, and I am now ready to tackle Hive and Spark SQL on an upcoming project. While this book specifically addresses Hive, the authors explain that other Hive-compatible components such as Spark SQL exist, and additionally explain what provides this compatibility. And because Hive was built to be used with HDFS, why the HDFS-compatibility of other available file systems increasingly being made available extend the applicability of Hive. This book provided me with a springboard that has enabled me to delve into the documentation with confidence, as well as directly address some of the misinformation I was hearing from technologists in the workplace.