Simple metastore creation for Hive in MySQL

For Hive, the meta-store is like the system catalog which contains metadata about the tables stored in Hive. This metadata is specified during table creation and reused every time the table is referenced in HiveQL. The database is a namespace for tables, where ‘default’ is used for tables with no user supplied database name. The metadata for table contains list of columns and their types, owner, storage and SerDe information (which I can detail in future posts). It can also contain any user supplied key and value data; which can be used for table statistics. Storage information includes location of the table’s data in the underlying file system, data formats and bucketing information. SerDe (which controls how Hive serializes/deserializes the data in a row) metadata includes the implementation class of serializer and deserializer methods and any supporting information required by that implementation. The partitions can have its own columns and SerDe and storage information which can be used in the future to evolve Hive schema.The metastore uses either a traditional relational database (like MySQL, Oracle) or file system and not HDFS since it is optimized for sequential scans only),thus the fired HiveQL statements are executed slow which only access metadata objects.


its simple to install the metastore.

-install mysql-conector

$ sudo yum install mysql-connector-java

-create a symbolic link in the Hive directory

$ ln -s /usr/share/java/mysql-connector-java.jar /usr/lib/hive/lib/mysqlconnector-java.jar

-create the database for the Hive metastore.cdh4 ships with scripts for derby,mysql,oracle and postgre

$ mysql -u root -p
mysql> CREATE DATABASE hivemetastoredb;
mysql> USE hivemetastoredb;
mysql> SOURCE /usr/lib/hive/scripts/metastore/upgrade/mysql/hive-schema- 0.9.0.mysql.sql;

-create a user for the metastore

mysql>CREATE USER 'hive'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'hive';

-grant access for all hosts in the network

mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON hivemetastoredb.* TO hive@'%' WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

following entries in the file /etc/hive/conf/hive-sites.xml, if you are trying a jdbc connection

<property>
<name>javax.jdo.option.ConnectionURL</name>
<value>jdbc:mysql://localhost/hivemetastoredb</value>
</property>
<property>
<name>javax.jdo.option.ConnectionDriverName</name>
<value>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</value>
</property>
<property>
<name>javax.jdo.option.ConnectionUserName</name>
<value>hive</value>
</property>
<property>
<name>javax.jdo.option.ConnectionPassword</name>
<value>hive</value>
</property>
<property>
<name>datanucleus.autoCreateSchema</name>
<value>false</value>
</property>
<property>
<name>datanucleus.fixedDatastore</name>
<value>true</value>
</property>