Upgrade to Hive 0.8

Running Hive 0.8 on Amazon EMR offers several improvements, such as support for Hadoop 1.0.3, Binary and Timestamp data types, a Plugin developer kit, and JDBC driver improvements. (For the full list of new features, see Supported Hive Versions.) To use these improvements, you can either launch a new cluster on an AMI that supports Hive 0.8 or upgrade an older Hive cluster to Hive 0.8.

Upgrading an existing cluster to Hive 0.8 is useful if you have a long-running cluster that you don't want to restart, or you are storing the Hive metastore outside of the cluster, for example, running a MySQL database on Amazon RDS.