Certain simple Hive queries can utilize fetch task, which can avoid the overhead of starting MapReduce job. hive.fetch.task.conversion This parameter controls which kind of simple query can be converted to a single fetch task. Value "none" is added in Hive 0.14 to disable this feature Value "minimal" means SELECT *, FILTER on partition columns (WHERE and HAVING clauses), LIMIT only. hive.fetch.task.conversion.threshold This parameter controls input threshold (in bytes) for applying hive.fetch.task.conversion.