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Starting with release 0.7, Hive fully supports local mode execution. To enable this, the user can enable the following option:

  hive> SET mapredmapreduce.jobframework.trackername=local;

In addition, mapred.local.dir should point to a path that's valid on the local machine (for example /tmp/<username>/mapred/local). (Otherwise, the user will get an exception allocating local disk space.)

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When using local mode (using mapredmapreduce.jobframework.trackername=local), Hadoop/Hive execution logs are produced on the client machine itself. Starting with release 0.6 – Hive uses the hive-exec-log4j.properties (falling back to hive-log4j.properties only if it's missing) to determine where these logs are delivered by default. The default configuration file produces one log file per query executed in local mode and stores it under /tmp/<user.name>. The intent of providing a separate configuration file is to enable administrators to centralize execution log capture if desired (on a NFS file server for example). Execution logs are invaluable for debugging run-time errors.

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