ok after going through the source code of PyHive, I understood that pip install PyHive install a different code than the one at https://github.com/dropbox/PyHive (even though the version are the same) 1) so I uninstalled previous version of pyhive 2) downloaded the souce from https://github.com/dropbox/PyHive and installed this 3) now im able to connect to remote hive using username/password ---- code ----- from pyhive import hive conn = hive.Connection(host="<host>", port=10000, username="<username>", password="<your pwd>", auth='CUSTOM') cur = conn.cursor() cur.execute('select * from <table>'); print cur.fetchone() ... View more