Hive – partition table query failed when stored as parquet

Hive is developed by Facebook to analyze and extract useful information from their huge data but now it is very popular in other organizations too such as Netflix and FINRA.

Use-case:

Now a days most of us are using different ways to optimize query or we can say to improve the performance of the Hive query. Out of which 2 most common techniques are:

1. Partitioning
2. Storing data in parquet format.

Partitioning is very known concept to the folks who are processing/analyzing/aggregating their data thru Apache Hive and the Parquet file format incorporates several features that make it highly suited to data warehouse-style.

But most of us are unaware of the fact that Apache hive does not support the query, when storing a partitioned table in parquet format and executing a query on partitioned column.

Let’s have a detail look into it.

Below is the pipe delimiter sample data present in HDFS which we will load into managed non-partitioned Hive table

Below steps will create a managed hive table named “hive_emp1”.

Loading data from HDFS into hive table (hive_emp1) which we have created in above steps.

Take a look into data present in Hive table created above.

We have few Males and 2 Females which are represented by ‘M’ and ‘F’ respectively in last column (sex).

Now, we will create another table in hive name “hive_emp_dynpart”, which will be partitioned on 2 columns (dept and gender) and also data of this table will be stored in parquet format.

Set the hive.exec.dynamic.partition to true and hive.exec.dynamic.partition.mode to nonstrict to load the data dynamically in hive table.

We will insert the data from hive_emp1 table into hive_emp_dynpart table along with partitions too.

Issue:

While querying the hive_emp_dynpart table with one of the partition column, you will get the following error, for all other regular column it is working fine. 

Those who are unable to see above screen, can refer to below statements for error.

hive> select * from hive_emp_dynpart where gender = 'M';
OK
Failed with exception java.io.IOException:java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Column [gender] was not found in schema!
Time taken: 0.255 seconds

Error Description:

It is a known bug in Apache Hive (HIVE-11401) filtering option, when the partitioned was stored as Parquet.

Resolution:

A known workaround is to disable predicate pushdown by setting property hive.optimize.index.filter to false.

Now query the table using same command.

Conclusion:

You need to set the property to false every time you execute the query.

hive2.3.0 fix it: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-15782