Unity catalog with Hive#

The Hive connector supports a subset of operations across managed and external tables when using the Databricks Unity Catalog as a metastore on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. The following table outlines which operations are supported.

Supported operations for Unity Catalog with Hive#
Operation	Supported for	Notes
CREATE SCHEMA	Managed and External	Applies to all table types.
CREATE TABLE	External	Only external tables can be created. Managed table creation is not supported.
DROP SCHEMA	Managed and External	Apples to all table types.
DROP TABLE	Managed and External	Both managed and external tables can be dropped.
INSERT	External	Write operations are supported only for external tables.
READ	Managed and External	Supported for both table types when using Unity Catalog as a metastore on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

The file formats used by Databricks tables CSV, JSON, AVRO, PARQUET, ORC, TEXT are mapped to the Hive table format with the corresponding file format in Starburst.

Configuration#

To use Unity Catalog metastore, add the following configuration properties to your catalog configuration file:

hive.metastore=unity
hive.security=read_only
hive.metastore.unity.host=host
hive.metastore.unity.token=token
hive.metastore.unity.catalog-name=main

The following table shows the configuration properties used to connect SEP to Unity Catalog as a metastore.

Unity configuration properties#
Property name	Description
`hive.metastore.unity.host`	Name of the host without http(s) prefix. For example: `dbc-a1b2345c-d6e7.cloud.databricks.com`
`hive.metastore.unity.token`	The personal access token used to authenticate a connection to the Unity Catalog metastore. For more information about generating access tokens, see the Databricks documentation.
`hive.metastore.unity.catalog-name`	Name of the catalog in Databricks.