Hive query to quickly find table size (number of rows)

Question

Is there a Hive query to quickly find table size (i.e. number of rows) without launching a time-consuming MapReduce job? (Which is why I want to avoid COUNT(*).)

I tried DESCRIBE EXTENDED, but that yielded numRows=0 which is obviously not correct.

(Apologies for the newb question. I tried Googling and searching the apache.org documentation without success.)

Answer 1

tblproperties will give the size of the table and can be used to grab just that value if needed.

-- gives all properties show tblproperties yourTableName  -- show just the raw data size show tblproperties yourTableName("rawDataSize")