title: Automated Testing in Apache Hive
body: <p>I am about to embark on a project using Apache Hadoop/Hive which will involve a collection of hive query scripts to produce data feeds for various down stream applications.  These scripts seem like ideal candidates for some unit testing - they represent the fulfillment of an API contract between my data store and client applications, and as such, it's trivial to write what the expected results should be for a given set of starting data.  My issue is how to run these tests.  </p>
  
  <p>If I was working with SQL queries, I could use something like SQLlite or Derby to quickly bring up test databases, load test data and run a collection of query tests against them.  Unfortunately, I am unaware of any such tools for Hive.  At the moment, my best thought is to have the test framework bring up a hadoop local instance and run Hive against that, but I've never done that before and I'm not sure it will work, or be the right path.</p>
  
  <p>Also, I'm not interested in a pedantic discussion about if what I am doing is unit testing or integration testing - I just need to be able to prove my code works. </p>