Thanks Artem and Neeraj. I just copied the data from /apps/hive/warehouse to a local directory. Note: Hive data is not necessary located in the folder mentioned above. i.e. external table can be defined anywhere within the HDFS. hive –e “DESCRIBE FORMATTED <tablename>” > <tablename_descformat>.txt; This command is to collect detail information of tables. The detail information for a table includes column, partition, database it belongs, owner, create time, last access time, protect mode, location, table type, storage information and etc. ... View more