Tag: ODBC

Setting your queue name with Microsoft Hive ODBC

When setting up an ODBC connection to a Hive server, you sometimes need to change your queue name – if the default queue you’re assigned doesn’t work for what you need to do, here’s how you change it in the DSN settings. You can use this process to set any other “Server Side Property” (or SSP) that your server requires.

  1. Open your DSN settings window for the data source where you want to set to queue name, and click “Advanced Options…” in the lower left:
The DSN Settings window that shows the common settings. This window is currently showing the default settings for the ODBC driver and your settings may be different.
  1. Click “Server Side Properties” in the lower-left corner of the Advanced Options window:
The “Advanced Settings” window with default settings.
  1. In the Properties window, click “Add..” on the right side to create a new property:
The window where you add new server side properties.
  1. Add any properties required by your Hive instance, including the mapreduce queue name if needed. You may have to ask your administrator what the name of this property is – some servers use “mapreduce.job.queuename” by default, and one server I use has this defined as “mapred.job.queue.name“, so you’ll need to confirm your server’s value. Once you know what it is, create it and click OK, and then it should look like this:
Show the results of the server side property for queue name once it’s set.
  1. That’s it! Go ahead and click “OK” and save the data source name settings, then you should be good to go!

If you have the need to use different queues for different purposes (or any other settings change based on your work), you can create multiple versions of your ODBC DSN and connect to whichever one is appropriate for the work you’re currently doing.

If you’re looking for a Hive driver, I’m showing the Microsoft Hive ODBC driver in this walkthrough and I’ve had a great experience with it (and it’s free – most other drivers at least require you to give your contact information, but this one doesn’t). There are other drivers you can use, and each has a place you can set any SSP that you need for your connection – please check the documentation for your specific driver if you need details.

Enjoy!

Identifying SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition features in use

I recently stumbled across a great system view, sys.dm_db_persisted_sku_features, which identifies any enterprise features in use in the current database, which would prevent you from moving this database to a Standard Edition instance. Unfortunately, it appears in SQL 2008, and I wanted to run this check on a SQL 2005 system.

There are a number of server-level features of SQL 2005 that require Enterprise Edition, but only two database-level features – partitioning and the VarDecimal storage format. Both are easy to check for, so I put together this quick query to do it:

select * from
   (-- VarDecimal Storage Format
    select case
             when max(objectproperty(object_id, N'TableHasVarDecimalStorageFormat')) = 0
               then ''
             else 'VarDecimal Storage'
           end as feature_name
      from sys.objects
    UNION ALL
    -- Partitioning
    select case
             when max(partition_number) > 1
               then 'Partitioning'
             else ''
           end
      from sys.partitions
) t
where feature_name <> ''
On a SQL 2005 server, this query will serve the same purpose that sys.dm_db_persisted_sku_features does on SQL 2008/2012 servers.