Yes. It can be processed. What needs to be done is transform unstructured data to structured form. Approach #1 One approach can be like develop ETL(Spark reduce) pipeline which will extract required data elements from the unstructured data and load into hive HIVE table. Approach#2 Alternate approach develop custom HIVE ser de which can read the unstructured data and then create table on top of file using custom ser de- Here is the official ge. DeveloperGe - Apache Hive - Apache Software Foundation s#DeveloperGe-HowtoWriteYourOwnSerDe Performance Approach #1 Hive query on the loaded data would be faster as data is already converted to structured form aspared to Approach 2 as on every fired query custom ser de can take more time to read the unstructured data. Hope this helps.