Page History

...

• TINYINT (1-byte signed integer, from -128 to 127)
• SMALLINT (2-byte signed integer, from -32,768 to 32,767)

• INT/INTEGER (4-byte signed integer, from -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647)

• BIGINT (8-byte signed integer, from -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807)
• FLOAT (4-byte single precision floating point number)
• DOUBLE (8-byte double precision floating point number)

• DOUBLE PRECISION (alias for DOUBLE, only available starting with Hive 2.2.0)

• DECIMAL
  • Introduced in Hive 0.11.0 with a precision of 38 digits
  • Hive 0.13.0 introduced user-definable precision and scale
• NUMERIC (same as DECIMAL, starting with Hive 3.0.0)

Date/Time Types

• TIMESTAMP (Note: Only available starting with Hive 0.8.0)
• DATE (Note: Only available starting with Hive 0.12.0)
• INTERVAL (Note: Only available starting with Hive 1.2.0)

...

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 4.004E+3 (scientific notation) or 4004 (non-scientific notation) or a combination of both, DECIMAL can be used for it.

...

Decimal literals provide precise values and greater range for floating point numbers than the DOUBLE type. Decimal data types store exact representations of numeric values, while DOUBLE data types store very close approximations of numeric values.

...