Hive should be able to skip header and footer rows when reading data file for a table

hive.file.max.footer   Default Value: 100   Max number of lines of footer user can set for a table file. skip.header.line.count   Default Value: 0   Number of header lines for the table file. skip.footer.line.count   Default Value: 0   Number of footer lines for the table file. "skip.footer.line.count" and "skip.header.line.count" should be specified in the table property during creating the table. Following example shows the usage of these two properties: Create external table testtable (name string, message string) row format delimited fields terminated by '\t' lines terminated by '\n' location '/testtable' tblproperties ("skip.header.line.count"="1", "skip.footer.line.count"="2");