List, Detail, Describe and Call Functions in Hive

In Apache Hive, there are hundreds of built-in functions, such as aggregate, statistical, date-time, string, type conversion, conditional, table creation, windowing, and more functions that we can’t remember all of the time. This article will teach you how to acquire a list of all available functions, describe them, retrieve information about them, and call them.

hive> SHOW FUNCTIONS
The above command will help in retrieving all the built-in functions available in Hive.

hive> DESCRIBE FUNCTION <function-name>
This will give a short description about the function. You can use “DESC” instead of “DESCRIBE”.

hive> DESCRIBE FUNCTION EXTENDED <function-name>
This will give the detailed description about the function.

hive> SELECT SUM(col1) FROM table1;
Simply provide the appropriate parameters to the function in the SELECT query. It could be a value or a particular column.

Hope you find this article helpful.

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