How to calculate Modification Times of Hive Tables

If you use external tables in hive or use methods other than Hive’s LOAD DATA to feed data to hive tables, you should be interested in how recent is your data.

Here’s a nifty little ruby snippet that allows you to get that using webhdfs

irb> require 'webhdfs'

irb> client = WebHDFS::Client.new('hadoop-nn', 50070)

irb> fl = client.list('/user/hive/warehouse/database.db/tablename/')

irb> DateTime.strptime(fl.collect {|x| x['modificationTime']}.max.to_s, '%M')