How to use Hive without hadoop

yes you can run hive without hadoop 1.create your warehouse on your local system 2. give default fs as file:/// than you can run hive in local mode with out hadoop installation

In Hive-site.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="configuration.xsl"?> 
<configuration>
      <property>
         <name>hive.metastore.schema.verification</name> 
         <value>false</value> 
      </property> 
     <property> 
      <!-- this should eventually be deprecated since the metastore should supply this --> 
        <name>hive.metastore.warehouse.dir</name> 
        <value>file:///tmp</value>
        <description></description> 
     </property>
     <property> 
        <name>fs.default.name</name> 
        <value>file:///tmp</value> 
     </property> 
</configuration>

If you are just talking about experiencing Hive before making a decision you can just use a preconfigured VM as @Maltram suggested (Hortonworks, Cloudera, IBM and others all offer such VMs)

What you should keep in mind that you will not be able to use Hive in production without Hadoop and HDFS so if it is a problem for you, you should consider alternatives to Hive

You cant, just download Hive, and run:

./bin/hiveserver2                                                                                                                                        
Cannot find hadoop installation: $HADOOP_HOME or $HADOOP_PREFIX must be set or hadoop must be in the path

Hadoop is like a core, and Hive need some library from it.