To clarify for others, I believe the reason the following doesn't work is that it was executed in a bash shell, i.e. using a typical terminal. hive --hivevar rdate=112211 -e "select 9${hivevar:rdate}9"  In double quoted strings, the '$' tells bash to treat  "{hivevar:rdate}" as a variable but it isn't defined so it returns an empty string before being passed in to hive due to the -e flag. i.e. "9${hivevar:rdate}9" is evaulated to "99" even before passing it into hive.   In contrast within single quotes there is no substitution in bash, so '9${hivevar:rdate}9' is passed into hive as is, so the following executes as the poster expected.   hive --hivevar rdate=112211 -e 'select 9${hivevar:rdate}9'   ... View more

This I believe, is in correlation to the following bug Link which was corrected in specific versions of Tez. If you are running Interactive query HDInsight in Azure, they are still using Tez .7.0 (not fixed). I did however, find this blog post that explains how to at least stop the queries from running. As far as I can tell, Tez will still show them as running, but it does free up your resources again. Edit: the follow up link is probably helpful 🙂 Fix ... View more