Hive organizes tables into partitions. It is a way of dividing a table into related parts based on the values of partitioned columns such as date, city, and department. Using partition, it is easy to query a portion of the data.
Tables or partitions are sub-divided into buckets, to provide extra structure to the data that may be used for more efficient querying. Bucketing works based on the value of hash function of some column of a table.
For example, a table named Tab1 contains employee data such as id, name, dept, and yoj (i.e., year of joining). Suppose you need to retrieve the details of all employees who joined in 2012. A query searches the whole table for the required information. However, if you partition the employee data with the year and store it in a separate file, it reduces the query processing time. The following example shows how to partition a file and its data:
The following file contains employeedata table.