Tables – These are analogous to Tables in Relational Databases. Tables can be filtered, projected, joined and unioned. Additionally all the data of a table is stored in a directory in HDFS. Hive also supports the notion of external tables wherein a table can be created on prexisting files or directories in HDFS by providing the appropriate location to the table creation DDL. The rows in a table are organized into typed columns similar to Relational Databases.
Partitions – Each Table can have one or more partition keys which determine how the data is stored, for example a table T with a date partition column ds had files with data for a particular date stored in the /ds= directory in HDFS. Partitions allow the system to prune data to be inspected based on query predicates, for example a query that is interested in rows from T that satisfy the predicate T.ds = '2008-09-01' would only have to look at files in /ds=2008-09-01/ directory in HDFS.
Buckets – Data in each partition may in turn be divided into Buckets based on the hash of a column in the table. Each bucket is stored as a file in the partition directory. Bucketing allows the system to efficiently evaluate queries that depend on a sample of data (these are queries that use the SAMPLE clause on the table).