I have faced same issue .Please increase the memory before running the hive query .But if you are not able to do grep on xml then you have to split your file on the basis of tags by using gawk. set mapreduce.map.memory.mb=9000; set mapreduce.map.java.opts=-Xmx7200m; set mapreduce.reduce.memory.mb=9000; set mapreduce.reduce.java.opts=-Xmx7200m; ... View more