Hive

An HMS or Glue table is treated as Hive when its properties match none of the markers used by the other table formats — Hive is the fallback format. Lakelet reads the schema from the metastore and lists data files from the table and partition locations.

Supported Data File Formats

Input format	Status
TextFile	Supported
Parquet	Supported
ORC	Not supported

Data Types

Hive type	Arrow type
`tinyint`	`Int8`
`smallint`	`Int16`
`int`, `integer`	`Int32`
`bigint`, `long`	`Int64`
`float`	`Float32`
`double`, `double precision`	`Float64`
`boolean`	`Boolean`
`string`, `binary string`	`Utf8`
`varchar(...)`, `char(...)`	`Utf8`
`binary`	`Binary`
`date`	`Date32`
`timestamp`	Microsecond timestamp without a timezone
`decimal(p,s)`	`Decimal128(p,s)`
`decimal` or an unparseable decimal declaration	`Decimal128(38,10)`

Types not listed above, including Hive complex types, are not currently supported.

Metadata Table

data_files

The data_files metadata table lists visible, non-empty data files:

SELECT * FROM `table_name$data_files`;

Files whose names start with _ or . and zero-byte files are excluded.

Column	Description
`file_path`	Full path of the data file, including the storage scheme
`file_size`	Size of the data file in bytes

partitions

The partitions metadata table returns one row for each metastore partition:

SELECT * FROM `table_name$partitions`;

An unpartitioned table returns no rows.

Column	Description
`partition`	Partition values as a string, such as `dt=2026-01-01/country=CN`
`data_file_count`	Number of data files in the partition, counted the same way as `data_files`
`total_data_file_size`	Combined size in bytes of those data files