Anubhav Tarar notes that you can run Hive queries against data even without a Hadoop installation:
Starting with release 0.7, Hive also supports a mode to run map-reduce jobs in local-mode automatically
you just have to do two things first create your warehouse in local system and give the default fs name to local put these properties inside your hive-site.xml
This is a fairly short post; click through to see the changes you’d make to hive-site.xml.