Hive troubleshooting

I am playing with Hadoop and Hive via Cloudera RPMs. The development status is very active, meaning it could be hard to track down the errors or find help with a specific one.

Permission of /tmp in HDFS

FAILED: Unknown exception : org.apache.hadoop.fs.permission.AccessControlException: Permission denied: user=mathie, access=WRITE, inode="tmp":hadoop:supergroup:rwxrwxr-x

Solution: You need to turn on full write permissions for /tmp

sudo -u hadoop hadoop fs -chmod 777 /tmp

.hivehistory

[root@r2 tmp]# sudo -u hadoop hive
Hive history file=/tmp/hadoop/hive_job_log_hadoop_200911142019_988931842.txt
java.io.FileNotFoundException: /.hivehistory (Permission denied)
 at java.io.FileOutputStream.open(Native Method)
 at java.io.FileOutputStream.(FileOutputStream.java:179)
 at java.io.FileOutputStream.(FileOutputStream.java:131)
 at java.io.FileWriter.(FileWriter.java:73)
 at jline.History.setHistoryFile(History.java:45)
 at jline.History.(History.java:37)
 at org.apache.hadoop.hive.cli.CliDriver.main(CliDriver.java:298)
 at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
 at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
 at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
 at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
 at org.apache.hadoop.util.RunJar.main(RunJar.java:155)
 at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.JobShell.run(JobShell.java:54)
 at org.apache.hadoop.util.ToolRunner.run(ToolRunner.java:65)
 at org.apache.hadoop.util.ToolRunner.run(ToolRunner.java:79)
 at org.apache.hadoop.mapred.JobShell.main(JobShell.java:68)

It means your $HOME folder is empty and it’s trying to create /.hivehistory on the top level, which of course is not possible. Solution: make sure it’s a real user with a $HOME (“echo $HOME” to check) and not via sudo

/etc/hive/conf/hive-site.xml

hive> show tables;
FAILED: Error in metadata: javax.jdo.JDODataStoreException: SQL exception: Add classes to Catalog "", Schema "APP"
NestedThrowables:
java.sql.SQLNonTransientConnectionException: No current connection.
FAILED: Execution Error, return code 1 from org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.exec.DDLTask
Time taken: 3.142 seconds

Even with embedded mode for metastore, if you run into this problem, look like an issue with Cloudera RPM for Hive that uses ${user.name} not being replaced properly.

Solution: change “${user.name}” to an regular folder and Hive works fine.