Setting the Execution Engine

Consider the following definitions:

• Runtime — execution time of job.
• Session time — time from the start of Hive shell or Beeline until you exit.

You can change the execution engine during a session (session time), but not while executing job in the session (runtime). If you specify the execution engine before starting the job, it will override the hive.execution.engine property in hive-site.xml file. For example, to specify the execution engine:

hive> set hive.execution.engine=tez;
hive> *perform some query here*

If you open another session of hive shell or beeline, you will not see the setting in the session from before and you can set needed properties for every session.