Apache Software Foundation is announcing that Apache Hive with version number 1.2.1 is already available to download.

What is Apache Hive ?

Apache Hive is A data storage system developed by Apache for housing large amounts of information, along with a custom SQL-like query language name HiveQL . Apache Hive was first developed as a Apache Hadoop sub-project for providing Hadoop administrators with an easy to use, proficient query language for their data.Because of this, Hive was developed from the start to work with huge amounts of information for each query and is perfectly adapted for large scale databases and business environments.Tools are included for easily loading, extracting and transforming the data, while custom data structures can be forced upon a wide set of data formats.Since it's an Hadoop-related project the HDFS and HBase projects are also automatically supported.HiveQL is probably the best part of the project, providing a simple, innovative and efficient query language, while also being able to handle mappers and reducers in situations where the native SQL syntax can't get the desired data. This is changelog for Apache Hive version 1.2.1 :

• Support uncorrelated subqueries in the WHERE clause
• Add NULL DEFINED AS to ROW FORMAT specification
• Ccreate/drop database should populate inputs/outputs and check concurrency and user permission
• Support specifying scale and precision with Hive decimal type

You can read the complete changelog and also download this latest version on their homepage: hive.apache.org