title: Hive query to quickly find table size (number of rows)
body: <p>Is there a Hive query to quickly find table size (i.e. number of rows) without launching a time-consuming MapReduce job? (Which is why I want to avoid <code>COUNT(*)</code>.)</p>
  
  <p>I tried <code>DESCRIBE EXTENDED</code>, but that yielded <code>numRows=0</code> which is obviously not correct.</p>
  
  <p>(Apologies for the newb question. I tried Googling and searching the apache.org documentation without success.)</p>