How to export a Hive table to S3

You can export a hive table to S3 in a single file using the following code snippet.

set mapred.reduce.tasks = 1;
insert overwrite directory 's3a://my-bucket/my_filename'
row format delimited fields terminated by ','
select * from mytable order by column_a;
set mapred.reduce.tasks = -1;

Note that we used the order by statement in order to force a single reducer since we didn’t; have any other “reduce” operation like “group by” and so on.