I have managed to solve my problem, it was a silly little mistake that I was making. I created JSON table using: ADD JAR hdfs://hwmaster01.com/user/root/hive-serdes-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar; CREATE TABLE tweets_pqt ( id BIGINT, created_at STRING, source STRING, favorited BOOLEAN, retweeted_status STRUCT< text:STRING, user:STRUCT<screen_name:STRING,name:STRING>, retweet_count:INT>, entities STRUCT< urls:ARRAY<STRUCT<expanded_url:STRING>>, user_mentions:ARRAY<STRUCT<screen_name:STRING,name:STRING>>, hashtags:ARRAY<STRUCT<text:STRING>>>, text STRING, user STRUCT< screen_name:STRING, name:STRING, friends_count:INT, followers_count:INT, statuses_count:INT, verified:BOOLEAN, utc_offset:INT, time_zone:STRING>, in_reply_to_screen_name STRING ) ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.apache.hive.hcatalog.data.JsonSerDe' After putting that above mentioned JAR file in Cloudera Manager's "Hive Auxiliary JARs Directory" (on un-managed machine you can find that under "hive.aux.jars.path" property in hive--site.xml) Then I created the Parquet table with same structure as above with a little change:   ADD JAR hdfs://hwmaster01.com/user/root/hive-serdes-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar; CREATE TABLE tweets_pqt ( id BIGINT, created_at STRING, source STRING, favorited BOOLEAN, retweeted_status STRUCT< text:STRING, user:STRUCT<screen_name:STRING,name:STRING>, retweet_count:INT>, entities STRUCT< urls:ARRAY<STRUCT<expanded_url:STRING>>, user_mentions:ARRAY<STRUCT<screen_name:STRING,name:STRING>>, hashtags:ARRAY<STRUCT<text:STRING>>>, text STRING, user STRUCT< screen_name:STRING, name:STRING, friends_count:INT, followers_count:INT, statuses_count:INT, verified:BOOLEAN, utc_offset:INT, time_zone:STRING>, in_reply_to_screen_name STRING ) --ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.apache.hive.hcatalog.data.JsonSerDe' STORED AS PARQUET; I inserted into parquet table succesfully the moment I commented that line.     ... View more