Comparing if two tables have identical content

Have you ever wanted to know if two database tables were the same? Perhaps you made some changes to a query and wanted to know if the result was still the same.

I was essentially looking for a way to diff two tables in Hive SQL, and used:
(TABLE a EXCEPT TABLE b)
UNION ALL
(TABLE b EXCEPT TABLE a);

Find the space used by a Hive table

There are a few ways to identify the space used by a Hive table.

Unfortunately, my Hive wouldn't accept these commands (and I haven't worked out why...):

• hive > SHOW TBLPROPERTIES <TableName>("rawDataSize")
• hive > DESCRIBE EXTENDED <TableName>

So I resorted to using the file system shell:

• hadoop fs -du -h <URI>