Hive Metastore
Apache Hive Metastore
Judgement: Caution
The catalog Iceberg REST is displacing; maintain only.
The metastore protocol of the Hadoop era. Long-standing de-facto standard for big-data catalogs — spoken by Spark, Trino, Presto, and most lakehouse engines.
Slowly being superseded by Iceberg REST and Unity Catalog, but installed bases will keep it relevant for many years to come.
Why it counts as a standard
The Hive Metastore Thrift API is publicly defined and re-implemented by every major lakehouse engine. "Speaks the Hive Metastore API" became the portability test for a generation of big-data tools — the API is the standard, independent of the original Hive server.
At a glance
- Category
- Catalog APIs
- Governance
- Apache Software Foundation
- Status
- Stable; ubiquitous in lakehouse engines, slowly being replaced by Iceberg REST and Unity Catalog
- First released
- 2010
Links
Related standards
Other standards in Catalog APIs.
- Iceberg Catalog — Iceberg REST Catalog
- Schema Registry — Confluent Schema Registry
- Unity Catalog
- DuckLake
See Hive Metastore in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare Hive Metastore against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.