I was originally thinking that we'd pull all the data out of the GDAL format & put it into Hive tables, but maybe it'd be smarter to develop a SerDe for Hive to read GDAL data. There appears to be some information out there on how to write a SerDe, but not a ton.
Per learning list (https://sites.google.com/site/hadoopstacklearning/home/hadoop-learning-list), should figure out how to use the GDAL data from the Fire data set. It has an API for Python - details here: http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/GdalOgrInPython.
I was originally thinking that we'd pull all the data out of the GDAL format & put it into Hive tables, but maybe it'd be smarter to develop a SerDe for Hive to read GDAL data. There appears to be some information out there on how to write a SerDe, but not a ton.