I agree, we'd like to upgrade to CDH5.5, or even CDH5.7.1. We're stuck on CDH5.2 for now due to having one or more jobs that use Scoobi. I'm not working on that, and don't have all the details, but my understanding is that either later versions of Cloudera no longer support Scoobi, or the version of Scoobi that we are using. Also, I think we can't upgrade Scoobi due to a developer (who has since left) customizing some library. There is an effort by others now to recreate those jobs to no longer use Scoobi to remove that dependency. Looks like that's going to take a month or more.
I agree that explode() works and does show the values in the map field. But, I still think that select itemspend (without using explode) should return the raw text in that field like HUE does. Plus, in the object explorer on the left, if I go to the Schema -> Tables -> and right click on checksummarybycheckid table, click Open Object Detail... , then click on Data tab - it returns error:
Unable to load Hive table data.
An exception was caught.
Could not create ResultSet: Unrecognized Thrift TTypeId value: MAP_TYPE
Can't use explode there.