HaHa. I never rejoined the list after it moved from Yahoo. I would not describe hive-thrift as horrible but there is some unpleasantness.
Near future: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-2935 In any case I am willing to accept the issues. I run multiple hive-thrift servers behind ha-proxy http://www.edwardcapriolo.com/roller/edwardcapriolo/entry/running_a_hive_thrift_cluster This cuts downs concurrency type problems. It's hive so not sure how much concurrency is needed there. Our group just decided to part ways with programming over the CLI. Too much stuff like this: hive -e -S "select x,y from $TABLE WHERE $STUFF" | awk whatever or: my list=`hadoop dfs -ls /bla` That was not unit testable and just really ugly. Even if it fails 1/1000 times we have try catch , and we have done stuff that can bring up the entire stack end to end in an IDE now. Layering on top of the CLI is a bad idea in the long run, its like expect scripting an ssh session. Not that it was a bad design chose for oozie at the time but it is certainly not the ideal way to handle it.
