Operation Timed Out for Hive Query in Hue and Qubole

Sometimes when you execute a very simple query in Hive you can get “The operation timed out. Do you want to retry?” error in Hue or “Error: java.io.IOException: Time limit exceeded for local fetch task with SimpleFetchOptimization” error in Qubole.

TL;DR: Set this before your query to resolve this:

set hive.fetch.task.conversion = none;

Consider the following query that times out in my case:

SELECT * 
FROM clicks
WHERE event_dt >= '2018-09-17' AND event_name = 'WEB_EVENT' AND 
  application = 'CLOUD_APP' AND env = 'PRD' AND id = 5
LIMIT 100;

Instead of executing a MapReduce or Tez job Hive just decides that it can read the data directly from the storage, it takes too long time so a time out happens.