Bucketing is a technique that allows you to decompose your data into more manageable parts, that is, fix the number of buckets. Usually, partitioning provides a way of segregating the data of a Hive table into multiple files or directories. Partitioning is used to increase the performance of queries, but the partitioning technique is efficient only if there is a limited number of partitions. Partitioning doesn't perform well if there is a large number of partitions; for example, we are doing partitioning on a column that has large number of unique values, then there will be a large number of partitions.

To overcome the problem of partitioning, Hive provides the concept of bucketing. In bucketing, we specify the fixed number of buckets in which entire data is to be decomposed. Bucketing concept is based on the hashing principle, where same type of keys are always sent to the same bucket.

In bucketing, records with the same bucketed columns will always go to the same bucket. When data...