This chapter is an overview of big data and Hive, especially in the Hadoop ecosystem. It briefly introduces the evolution of big data so that readers know where they are in the journey of big data and can find out their preferred areas in future learning. This chapter also covers how Hive has become one of the leading tools in the big data ecosystem and why it is still competitive.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• A short history from the database, data warehouse to big data
• Introducing big data
• Relational and NoSQL databases versus Hadoop
• Batch, real-time, and stream processing
• Hadoop ecosystem overview
• Hive overview