How do we get the 1000 tables description using hive?

Answer 1

You can make a shell script and call it with a parameter. For example following script receives schema, prepares list of tables in the schema, calls DESCRIBE EXTENDED command, extracts location, prints table location for first 1000 tables in the schema ordered by name. You can modify and use it as a single command:

#!/bin/bash

#Create table list for a schema (script parameter)
HIVE_SCHEMA=$1
echo Processing Hive schema $HIVE_SCHEMA...
tablelist=tables_$HIVE_SCHEMA

 hive -e " set hive.cli.print.header=false; use $HIVE_SCHEMA; show tables;" 1>  $tablelist

#number of tables
tableNum_limit=1000

#For each table do:
for table in $(cat $tablelist|sort|head -n "$tableNum_limit") #add proper sorting
 do 

 echo Processing table $table ...

     #Call DESCRIBE
     out=$(hive client -S -e "use $HIVE_SCHEMA; DESCRIBE EXTENDED $table")

     #Get location for example
     table_location=$(echo "${out}" | egrep -o 'location:[^,]+' | sed 's/location://')
     echo Table location: $table_location
     #Do something else here

done