Looks like a good suggestion. Ideally the driver code should just return a structure that encodes the columns separately as opposed to a single serialized string today and the formatting logic should all be in the CliDriver
Ashish -----Original Message----- From: Edward Capriolo [mailto:edlinuxg...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2010 1:00 PM To: hive-u...@hadoop.apache.org Subject: HIVE-49 and other forms of CLI niceness All, Some simple features in Hive can really bring down the learning curve for new users. I am teaching some how to use hive. A buddy if mine did this. hive> select * from mt_date_test; OK a 2010-01-01 NULL b 2009-12-31 NULL c 2010-01-27 NULL hive> select * from mt_date_test where my_date > '2010-01-01'; 2010-01-27 08:18:27,008 map = 100%, reduce =100% Ended Job = job_200909171715_20264 OK I instantly suspected 1) whiteplace 2) delimeters hive> select key from mt_date_test; OK a 2010-01-01 b 2009-12-31 c 2010-01-27 !!BINGO!! Should we use a pipe | or some other column delimiter like the mysql CLI does? and have this be a property that is on by default hive.cli.columnseparator='\t' hive.cli.columnseparator='|' In its current state the user understandably made the assumption that '>' does not work on strings. Should we add some expose the format of the results in Driver so that the CLI can effectively split the rows by column?