I managed to find the _metadata file associated with my table in Hive and I am trying to make sense of the information it contains. Besides some straight-forward properties like table name, schema, SerDe classes, there are some interesting ones like:
*"i32":1345739794* * * *"transient_lastDdlTime":"1345740507"* * * about which I have a very little idea and which I would really like to understand. There seems no Hive metadata description on the Internet, which is strange and unfortunate. Perhaps some of you know a lot about it. I attach a formatted metadata file should anyone decide to take a look at it. Thank you very much! -- Regards, Petr Babkin Ontologist, Revelytix Inc.
_metadata
Description: Binary data
