@Viswa
Here are the 2 major aspects on which they differ:
1. Connection:
- The Hive CLI, which connects directly to HDFS and the Hive Metastore, and can be used only on a host with access to those services.
- Beeline, which connects to HiveServer2 and requires access to only one .jar file:
hive-jdbc-<version>-standalone.jar
.
2. Authentication
- Hive CLI uses only Storage Based Authentication
- Beeline uses SQL standard-based authorization or Ranger-based authorization. Thus greater security.
It is better to use Beeline for the above reasons than Hive CLI (I believe it will soon be deprecated).
Read here for greater understanding on beeline : https://docs.hortonworks.com/HDPDocuments/HDP2/HDP-2.6.1/bk_data-access/content/beeline-vs-hive-cli....