Integration testing Hive jobs

Question

I'm trying to write a non-trivial Hive job using the Hive Thrift and JDBC interfaces, and I'm having trouble setting up a decent JUnit test. By non-trivial, I mean that the job results in at least one MapReduce stage, as opposed to only dealing with the metastore.

The test should fire up a Hive server, load some data into a table, run some non-trivial query on that table, and check the results.

I've wired up a Spring context according to the Spring reference. However, the job fails on the MapReduce phase, complaining that no Hadoop binary exists:

java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "/usr/bin/hadoop" (in directory "/Users/yoni/opower/workspace/intellij_project_root"): error=2, No such file or directory

The problem is that the Hive Server is running in-memory, but relies upon local installation of Hive in order to run. For my project to be self-contained, I need the Hive services to be embedded, including the HDFS and MapReduce clusters. I've tried starting up a Hive server using the same Spring method and pointing it at MiniDFSCluster and MiniMRCluster, similar to the pattern used in the Hive QTestUtil source and in HBaseTestUtility. However, I've not been able to get that to work.

After three days of trying to wrangle Hive integration testing, I thought I'd ask the community:

1. How do you recommend I integration test Hive jobs?
2. Do you have a working JUnit example for integration testing Hive jobs using in-memory HDFS, MR, and Hive instances?

Additional resources I've looked at:

• Hive Unit Testing tutorial
• the Spring Hive example

Edit: I am fully aware that working against a Hadoop cluster - whether local or remote - makes it possible to run integration tests against a full-stack Hive instance. The problem, as stated, is that this is not a viable solution for effectively testing Hive workflows.

Answer 1

Ideally one would be able to test hive queries with LocalJobRunner rather than resorting to mini-cluster testing. However, due to HIVE-3816 running hive with mapred.job.tracker=local results in a call to the hive CLI executable installed on the system (as described in your question).

Until HIVE-3816 is resolved, mini-cluster testing is the only option. Below is a minimal mini-cluster setup for hive tests that I have tested against CDH 4.4.

Configuration conf = new Configuration();

/* Build MiniDFSCluster */
MiniDFSCluster miniDFS = new MiniDFSCluster.Builder(conf).build();

/* Build MiniMR Cluster */
System.setProperty("hadoop.log.dir", "/path/to/hadoop/log/dir"); // MAPREDUCE-2785
int numTaskTrackers = 1;
int numTaskTrackerDirectories = 1;
String[] racks = null;
String[] hosts = null;
miniMR = new MiniMRCluster(numTaskTrackers, miniDFS.getFileSystem().getUri().toString(),
                           numTaskTrackerDirectories, racks, hosts, new JobConf(conf));

/* Set JobTracker URI */
System.setProperty("mapred.job.tracker", miniMR.createJobConf(new JobConf(conf)).get("mapred.job.tracker"));

There is no need to run a separate hiveserver or hiveserver2 process for testing. You can test with an embedded hiveserver2 process by setting your jdbc connection URL to jdbc:hive2:///