Apache Hive is a software program for data warehouse applications that seek to harness petabyte-scale datasets. It allows for the fast reading, writing, and managing of data on a big data scale, including the ability to project structure onto unstructured datasets that are already in storage. Hive has thus become an important tool to enable data scientists and data engineers to conduct typical data warehousing activities like extract/transform/load (ETL), reporting, and data analysis with today’s extraordinarily large and complex datasets.

While Hive allows for the use of an SQL interface for queries similar to those used by traditional, centralized database management systems (DMBS), it is built to work with distributed file systems that integrate with the popular, open-source Apache Hadoop framework. Thus, it offers maximum scalability, performance, fault tolerance, and loose-coupling with input formats, and works with other programs in the Apache ecosystem like Apache Spark and MapReduce.

Today’s data engineers must work with increasingly unwieldy datasets, creating data infrastructure that can take structured, unstructured, and real-time big data-scale datasets and deliver them to data scientists and the software applications they build in a usable form. Thus, Hive has become indispensable for many data engineers, especially those working at leading tech companies that may pull data from diverse sources such as shopping histories, social media activity, geographic location, and more.

Unsurprisingly, data engineers capable of working on these big data projects are in high demand - and are highly paid. According to Glassdoor, the average base salary for data engineers is $102,864 per year.

Absolutely! Coursera is a fantastic place to build a wide variety of computer science and data science skills, including working with Hive and the rest of the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. You can learn from top-ranked schools like University of California San Diego, industry leaders like Cloudera and Yandex, or by completing step-by-step tutorials alongside experienced instructors as part of Coursera’s Guided Projects. Regardless of how you choose to learn, Coursera lets you view course materials and complete assignments on a flexible schedule, ensuring you can pick up valuable skills in Hive and other data science topics alongside your existing studies or career.