What is SerDe in Apache Hive ?

        A SerDe is a short name for a Serializer Deserializer. Hive uses SerDe (and FileFormat) to read and write data from tables. An important concept behind Hive is that it DOES NOT own the Hadoop File System (HDFS) format that data is stored in. Users are able to write files to HDFS with whatever tools/mechanism takes their fancy("CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE" or "LOAD DATA INPATH," ) and use Hive to correctly "parse" that file format in a way that can be used by Hive. A SerDe is a powerful (and customizable) mechanism that Hive uses to "parse" data stored in HDFS to be used by Hive.