How to Access Hive via Python?

Question

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/HiveClient#HiveClient-Python appears to be outdated.

When I add this to /etc/profile:

export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/usr/lib/hive/lib/py

I can then do the imports as listed in the link, with the exception of from hive import ThriftHive which actually need to be:

from hive_service import ThriftHive

Next the port in the example was 10000, which when I tried caused the program to hang. The default Hive Thrift port is 9083, which stopped the hanging.

So I set it up like so:

from thrift import Thrift
from thrift.transport import TSocket
from thrift.transport import TTransport
from thrift.protocol import TBinaryProtocol
try:
    transport = TSocket.TSocket('<node-with-metastore>', 9083)
    transport = TTransport.TBufferedTransport(transport)
    protocol = TBinaryProtocol.TBinaryProtocol(transport)
    client = ThriftHive.Client(protocol)
    transport.open()
    client.execute("CREATE TABLE test(c1 int)")

    transport.close()
except Thrift.TException, tx:
    print '%s' % (tx.message)

I received the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/hive/lib/py/hive_service/ThriftHive.py", line 68, in execute
self.recv_execute()
File "/usr/lib/hive/lib/py/hive_service/ThriftHive.py", line 84, in recv_execute
raise x
thrift.Thrift.TApplicationException: Invalid method name: 'execute'

But inspecting the ThriftHive.py file reveals the method execute within the Client class.

How may I use Python to access Hive?

Answer 1

I believe the easiest way is to use PyHive.

To install you'll need these libraries:

pip install sasl
pip install thrift
pip install thrift-sasl
pip install PyHive

Please note that although you install the library as PyHive, you import the module as pyhive, all lower-case.

If you're on Linux, you may need to install SASL separately before running the above. Install the package libsasl2-dev using apt-get or yum or whatever package manager for your distribution. For Windows there are some options on GNU.org, you can download a binary installer. On a Mac SASL should be available if you've installed xcode developer tools (xcode-select --install in Terminal)

After installation, you can connect to Hive like this:

from pyhive import hive
conn = hive.Connection(host="YOUR_HIVE_HOST", port=PORT, username="YOU")

Now that you have the hive connection, you have options how to use it. You can just straight-up query:

cursor = conn.cursor()
cursor.execute("SELECT cool_stuff FROM hive_table")
for result in cursor.fetchall():
  use_result(result)

...or to use the connection to make a Pandas dataframe:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_sql("SELECT cool_stuff FROM hive_table", conn)