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The DECIMAL type in Hive is based on Java's BigDecimal which is used for representing immutable arbitrary precision decimal numbers in Java. All regular number operations (e.g. +, -, *, /) and relevant UDFs (e.g. Floor, Ceil, Round, and many more) handle decimal types. You can cast to/from decimal types like you would do with other numeric types. The persistence format of the decimal type supports both scientific and non-scientific notation. Therefore, regardless of whether your dataset contains data like 1E+44 (scientific notation) or 4004 (non-scientific notation) or a combination of both, DECIMAL can be used for it.

• Hive 0.11 and 0.12 have the precision of the DECIMAL type fixed and limited to 38 digits.
• As of Hive 0.13 users can specify scale and precision when creating tables with the DECIMAL datatype using a DECIMAL(precision, scale) syntax.  If scale is not specified, it defaults to 0 (no fractional digits). If no precision is specified, it defaults to 10.

CREATE TABLE foo (
  a DECIMAL, -- Defaults to decimal(10,0)
  b DECIMAL(9, 7)
)

For usage, see Floating Point Types in the Literals section below.

Decimal Literals

Integral literals larger than BIGINT must be handled with Decimal(38,0). The Postfix BD is required. Example:

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