Hive query to quickly find table size (number of rows)

Question

Is there a Hive query to quickly find table size (i.e. number of rows) without launching a time-consuming MapReduce job? (Which is why I want to avoid COUNT(*).)

Answer 1

tblproperties will give the size of the table and can be used to grab just that value if needed.

-- gives all properties
show tblproperties yourTableName

-- show just the raw data size
show tblproperties yourTableName("rawDataSize")