A Hive target can be an internal table or an external table. Internal Hive tables are managed by Hive and are also known as managed tables. External Hive tables are tables managed by an external source such as HDFS, Amazon S3, or Microsoft Azure Blob Storage.

When a mapping creates or replaces a Hive table, the type of table that the mapping creates depends on the run-time engine that you use to run the mapping:

On the Blaze engine, mappings create managed tables.
On the Spark engine, mappings create external tables.

For mappings that run on the Spark engine or the Blaze engine, you can create a custom DDL query that creates or replaces a Hive table at run time. However, with the Blaze engine, you cannot use a backtick (`) character in the DDL query. The backtick character is required in HiveQL when you include special characters or keywords in a query.

The Spark engine can write to bucketed Hive targets. Bucketing and partitioning of Hive tables can improve performance by reducing data shuffling and sorting.

Hortonworks HDP 3.1 uses ACID-enabled ORC targets by default and uses ACID for all managed tables. If you do not want to use ACID-enabled tables, use external tables.