Hive is not showing tables

Question

I am new to Hadoop and Hive world.

I have a strange problem. When I was working on hive prompt. I have created few tables and hive was showing those tables.

After exiting Hive session when I am again starting Hive terminal "show tables;" is not showing any table!. I can see tables in '/user/hive/warehouse' in HDFS.

What is wrong am I doing. Can you please help me on this?

Answer 1

BalduZ is right . set this in $HIVE_HOME/conf/hive-site.xml

property name = javax.jdo.option.ConnectionURL

property value = jdbc:derby:;databaseName=/home/youruser/hive_metadata/metastore_db;create=true

Next time onwards you can run hive from any dir location. This will solve your problem.

Answer 2

I assume you are using the default configuration, so the problem is where you call hive to start working, since you need to call it from the same directory in order to see the tables you created in the previous hive session.

For example, if you call hive when you are in ~/test/hive and create some tables, and the next time you use hive you start it from ~/test you will not see the tables you created earlier. The easiest solution is to always start hive from the same directory.

However, a better solution would be to configure hive so that it uses a database like MySQL as a metastore. You can find how to do this here.