[csv] How to export a Hive table into a CSV file?

I used this Hive query to export a table into a CSV file.

INSERT OVERWRITE DIRECTORY '/user/data/output/test' select column1, column2 from table1;

The file generated '000000_0' does not have comma separator

Is this the right way to generate CSV file? If no, please let me know how can I generate the CSV file?

There are ways to change the default delimiter, as shown by other answers.

There are also ways to convert the raw output to csv with some bash scripting. There are 3 delimiters to consider though, not just \001. Things get a bit more complicated when your hive table has maps.

I wrote a bash script that can handle all 3 default delimiters (\001 \002 and \003) from hive and output a csv. The script and some more info are here:

Hive Default Delimiters to CSV

Hive's default delimiters are

Row Delimiter => Control-A ('\001')
Collection Item Delimiter => Control-B ('\002')
Map Key Delimiter => Control-C ('\003')

There are ways to change these delimiters when exporting tables but sometimes you might still get stuck needing to convert this to csv.

Here's a quick bash script that can handle a DB export that's segmented in multiple files and has the default delimiters. It will output a single CSV file.

It is assumed that the segments all have the naming convention 000*_0

INDIRECTORY="path/to/input/directory"
for f in $INDIRECTORY/000*_0; do 
  echo "Processing $f file.."; 
  cat -v $f | 
      LC_ALL=C sed -e "s/^/\"/g" | 
      LC_ALL=C sed -e "s/\^A/\",\"/g" | 
      LC_ALL=C sed -e "s/\^C\^B/\"\":\"\"\"\",\"\"/g" | 
      LC_ALL=C sed -e "s/\^B/\"\",\"\"/g" |  
      LC_ALL=C sed -e "s/\^C/\"\":\"\"/g" | 
      LC_ALL=C sed -e "s/$/\"/g" > $f-temp
done
echo "you,can,echo,your,header,here,if,you,like" > $INDIRECTORY/final_output.csv
cat $INDIRECTORY/*-temp >> $INDIRECTORY/final_output.csv
rm $INDIRECTORY/*-temp

More explanation on the gist

This is a much easier way to do it within Hive's SQL:

set hive.execution.engine=tez;
set hive.merge.tezfiles=true;
set hive.exec.compress.output=false;

INSERT OVERWRITE DIRECTORY '/tmp/job/'
ROW FORMAT DELIMITED
FIELDS TERMINATED by ','
NULL DEFINED AS ''
STORED AS TEXTFILE
SELECT * from table;

Below is the end-to-end solution that I use to export Hive table data to HDFS as a single named CSV file with a header.
(it is unfortunate that it's not possible to do with one HQL statement)
It consists of several commands, but it's quite intuitive, I think, and it does not rely on the internal representation of Hive tables, which may change from time to time.
Replace "DIRECTORY" with "LOCAL DIRECTORY" if you want to export the data to a local filesystem versus HDFS.

# cleanup the existing target HDFS directory, if it exists
sudo -u hdfs hdfs dfs -rm -f -r /tmp/data/my_exported_table_name/*

# export the data using Beeline CLI (it will create a data file with a surrogate name in the target HDFS directory)
beeline -u jdbc:hive2://my_hostname:10000 -n hive -e "INSERT OVERWRITE DIRECTORY '/tmp/data/my_exported_table_name' ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' SELECT * FROM my_exported_table_name"

# set the owner of the target HDFS directory to whatever UID you'll be using to run the subsequent commands (root in this case)
sudo -u hdfs hdfs dfs -chown -R root:hdfs /tmp/data/my_exported_table_name

# write the CSV header record to a separate file (make sure that its name is higher in the sort order than for the data file in the target HDFS directory)
# also, obviously, make sure that the number and the order of fields is the same as in the data file
echo 'field_name_1,field_name_2,field_name_3,field_name_4,field_name_5' | hadoop fs -put - /tmp/data/my_exported_table_name/.header.csv

# concatenate all (2) files in the target HDFS directory into the final CSV data file with a header
# (this is where the sort order of the file names is important)
hadoop fs -cat /tmp/data/my_exported_table_name/* | hadoop fs -put - /tmp/data/my_exported_table_name/my_exported_table_name.csv

# give the permissions for the exported data to other users as necessary
sudo -u hdfs hdfs dfs -chmod -R 777 /tmp/data/hive_extr/drivers

I had a similar issue and this is how I was able to address it.

Step 1 - Loaded the data from hive table into another table as follows

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS TestHiveTableCSV; CREATE TABLE TestHiveTableCSV ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' AS SELECT Column List FROM TestHiveTable;

Step 2 - Copied the blob from hive warehouse to the new location with appropriate extension

Start-AzureStorageBlobCopy -DestContext $destContext -SrcContainer "Source Container" -SrcBlob "hive/warehouse/TestHiveTableCSV/000000_0" -DestContainer "Destination Container" ` -DestBlob "CSV/TestHiveTable.csv"

Hope this helps!

Best Regards, Dattatrey Sindol (Datta) http://dattatreysindol.com

I have used simple linux shell piping + perl to convert hive generated output from tsv to csv.

hive -e "SELECT col1, col2, … FROM table_name" | perl -lpe 's/"/\\"/g; s/^|$/"/g; s/\t/","/g' > output_file.csv

(I got the updated perl regex from someone in stackoverflow some time ago)

The result will be like regular csv:

"col1","col2","col3"... and so on

INSERT OVERWRITE LOCAL DIRECTORY '/home/lvermeer/temp' ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' select * from table; 

is the correct answer.

If the number of records is really big, based on the number of files generated

the following command would give only partial result.

hive -e 'select * from some_table' > /home/yourfile.csv

Here using Hive warehouse dir you can export data instead of Hive table. first give hive warehouse path and after local path where you want to store the .csv file For this command is bellow :-

hadoop fs -cat /user/hdusr/warehouse/HiveDb/tableName/* > /users/hadoop/test/nilesh/sample.csv

or use this

hive -e 'select * from your_Table' | sed 's/[\t]/,/g'  > /home/yourfile.csv

You can also specify property set hive.cli.print.header=true before the SELECT to ensure that header along with data is created and copied to file. For example:

hive -e 'set hive.cli.print.header=true; select * from your_Table' | sed 's/[\t]/,/g'  > /home/yourfile.csv

If you don't want to write to local file system, pipe the output of sed command back into HDFS using the hadoop fs -put command.

It may also be convenient to SFTP to your files using something like Cyberduck, or you can use scp to connect via terminal / command prompt.

In case you are doing it from Windows you can use Python script hivehoney to extract table data to local CSV file.

It will:

• Login to bastion host.
• pbrun.
• kinit.
• beeline (with your query).
• Save echo from beeline to a file on Windows.

Execute it like this:

set PROXY_HOST=your_bastion_host

set SERVICE_USER=you_func_user

set LINUX_USER=your_SOID

set LINUX_PWD=your_pwd

python hh.py --query_file=query.sql

That should work for you

• tab separated

  hive -e 'select * from some_table' > /home/yourfile.tsv

• comma separated

  hive -e 'select * from some_table' | sed 's/[\t]/,/g' > /home/yourfile.csv

try

hive --outputformat==csv2 -e "select * from YOUR_TABLE";

This worked for me

my hive version is "Hive 3.1.0.3.1.0.0-78"

You can not have a delimiter for query output,after generating the report (as you did).

you can change the delimiter to comma.

It comes with default delimiter \001 (inivisible character).

hadoop fs -cat /user/data/output/test/* |tr "\01" "," >>outputwithcomma.csv

check this also

Recent versions of hive comes with this feature.

INSERT OVERWRITE LOCAL DIRECTORY '/home/lvermeer/temp' 
ROW FORMAT DELIMITED 
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' 
select * from table;

this way you can choose your own delimiter and file name. Just be careful with the "OVERWRITE" it will try to delete everything from the mentioned folder.

If you're using Hive 11 or better you can use the INSERT statement with the LOCAL keyword.

Example:

insert overwrite local directory '/home/carter/staging' row format delimited fields terminated by ',' select * from hugetable;

Note that this may create multiple files and you may want to concatenate them on the client side after it's done exporting.

Using this approach means you don't need to worry about the format of the source tables, can export based on arbitrary SQL query, and can select your own delimiters and output formats.

The problem solutions are fine but I found some problems in both:

• As Carter Shanklin said, with this command we will obtain a csv file with the results of the query in the path specified:

  insert overwrite local directory '/home/carter/staging' row format delimited fields terminated by ',' select * from hugetable;
  

  The problem with this solution is that the csv obtained won´t have headers and will create a file that is not a CSV (so we have to rename it).

• As user1922900 said, with the following command we will obtain a CSV files with the results of the query in the specified file and with headers:

  hive -e 'select * from some_table' | sed 's/[\t]/,/g' > /home/yourfile.csv
  

  With this solution we will get a CSV file with the result rows of our query, but with log messages between these rows too. As a solution of this problem I tried this, but without results.

So, to solve all these issues I created a script that execute a list of queries, create a folder (with a timestamp) where it stores the results, rename the files obtained, remove the unnecesay files and it also add the respective headers.

 #!/bin/sh
 QUERIES=("select * from table1" "select * from table2")
 IFS=""
 directoryname=$(echo "ScriptResults$timestamp")
 mkdir $directoryname 
 counter=1 
for query in ${QUERIES[*]}
 do 
     tablename="query"$counter 
     hive -S -e "INSERT OVERWRITE LOCAL DIRECTORY '/data/2/DOMAIN_USERS/SANUK/users/$USER/$tablename' ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' $query ;"
     hive -S -e "set hive.cli.print.header=true; $query limit 1" | head -1 | sed 's/[\t]/,/g' >> /data/2/DOMAIN_USERS/SANUK/users/$USER/$tablename/header.csv
     mv $tablename/000000_0 $tablename/$tablename.csv
     cat $tablename/$tablename.csv >> $tablename/header.csv.
     rm $tablename/$tablename.csv
     mv $tablename/header.csv $tablename/$tablename.csv 
     mv $tablename/$tablename.csv $directoryname
     counter=$((counter+1))
     rm -rf $tablename/ 
 done

The following script should work for you:

#!/bin/bash
hive -e "insert overwrite local directory '/LocalPath/'
row format delimited fields terminated by ','
select * from Mydatabase,Mytable limit 100"
cat /LocalPath/* > /LocalPath/table.csv

I used limit 100 to limit the size of data since I had a huge table, but you can delete it to export the entire table.