Apache Hive Cookbook

Using miscellaneous data types

Hive supports two miscellaneous data types: Boolean and Binary:

Boolean accepts true or false values.

Binary is a sequence of bytes. It is similar to the VARBINARY data type found in many relational databases. If a field is declared as the binary type, then it is stored within a record, not separately like BLOBs. The binary data type is used when a record has hundreds of columns, and the user is just interested in a few columns and doesn't bother about an exact type information of other columns. In such cases, a user can define the type of those columns as binary, so Hive will not try to interpret those columns. It is used to include the arbitrary types in record, and Hive doesn't attempt to parse them as numbers, ...