 <p>In this specific case i think there is a guarantee.<br> Some queries in Hive won't generate MR jobs and instead will IO the table directly in a serial way.<br> In your case, querying <code>select * from table</code> will not generate a MR job (unless <code>table</code> is a view).<br> Reading the table with a single process, reads from the first file to the last and from the head of each file to the end. hence, I believe that the order of the output in this way will be the same whenever you'll run the query. </p> <p>This is of course not right in the case of MR jobs generated from the SQL.</p>