title: What is hive, Is it a database?
body: <p>I just started exploring Hive. It has all the structures similar to an RDBMS like tables, joins, partitions.. what i understand is Hive still uses HDFS for storage and it is an SQL abstraction of HDFS. From this I am not sure weather Hive itself is a database solution like HBase, Cassnadra..  or simply it is a query system on top of HDFS. I don't think it is simply a query language because it has tables, joins and partitions..</p>