Its better not to disturb the properties on the statistics usage like hive.compute.query.using.stats. It impacts the way the statistics are used in your query for performance optimization and execution plans. It has tremendous influence on execution plans, the statistics stored depends on the file format as well. Therefore definitely not a solution to change any property with regards to statistics. The real reason for count not working correctly is the statistics not updated in the hive due to which it returns 0. When a table is created first, the statistics is written with no data rows. Thereafter any data append/change happens hive requires to update this statistics in the metadata. Depending on the circumstances hive might not be updating this real time. Therefore running the ANALYZE command recomputes this statistics to make this work correctly. ... View more