Apache Hive Essentials

Buckets

Besides partition, the bucket is another technique to cluster datasets into more manageable parts to optimize query performance. Different from a partition, a bucket corresponds to segments of files in HDFS. For example, the employee_partitioned table from the previous section uses year and month as the top-level partition. If there is a further request to use employee_id as the third level of partition, it creates many partition directories. For instance, we can bucket the employee_partitioned table using employee_id as a bucket column. The value of this column will be hashed by a user-defined number of buckets. The records with the same employee_id will always be stored in the same bucket (segment of files). The bucket columns are ...