Peter Coates shows how to make Hive EXPLAIN plans a lot prettier:
As you probably know, if you prepend the word EXPLAIN to your SQL query and then run it, Hive prints out a text description of the query plan. This lets you explore the effects such variations as code changes, the use of analyze, turning on/off the cost-based optimizer (CBO), and so on. It’s an essential tool for optimizing Hive.
The output of EXPLAIN is far from pretty, but fortunately, a simple pipeline of Linux commands can give you a slick graphical rendition like the one below.
I’m going to have to keep this in mind.