It has started working now. I don't know what I changed. I dropped every
single table from hive, explicitly created a new directory on HDFS and moved
the .csv file to that directory, ran hive again and created the table. This
time it worked. I can perform queries against the directory. Maybe hadoop and
hive confused each other about the other directory (it got corrupted or
something)...or maybe I screwed something up, I dunno.
I would have expected better error-detection. Instead of simply returning
0-length queries, it would be nice if hive would actually produce an error
message if I create the table in an invalid or incorrect fashion...but perhaps
it couldn't tell; maybe the database just looked empty at hive's level of
abstraction.
I mean, even if I did screw something up (an option I am entirely open to), I
never really got an error about it. Hive gladly wrapped a "hive" table around
the directory, and the csv file in question, without an error of any kind.
Hive could see the table, it listed and could describe it, but would then
return empty queries against the table. When I moved the exact same csv file
to a brand new HDFS directory and tried again from scratch, everything started
working. I probably did something wrong, but some sort of error message would
have been very helpful.
Anyway, these tools are still pretty young. I understand that they will
continue to evolve. The ability to detect and report errors will almost
certainly improve with time.
Thanks for the concerted efforts to help.
Cheers!
________________________________________________________________________________
Keith Wiley kwi...@keithwiley.com keithwiley.com music.keithwiley.com
"What I primarily learned in grad school is how much I *don't* know.
Consequently, I left grad school with a higher ignorance to knowledge ratio than
when I entered."
-- Keith Wiley
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