Installation from Tarball

HCatalog Installed with Hive

HCatalog Command Line

If you install Hive from the binary tarball, the hcat command is available in the hcatalog/bin directory.

The hcat command line is similar to the hive command line; the main difference is that it restricts the queries that can be run to metadata-only operations such as DDL and DML queries used to read metadata (for example, "show tables").

The HCatalog CLI is documented here and the Hive CLI is documented here.

Most hcat commands can be issued as hive commands except for "hcat -g" and "hcat -p". Note that the hcat command uses the -p flag for permissions but hive uses it to specify a port number.

HCatalog Client Jars

In the Hive tar.gz, HCatalog libraries are available under hcatalog/share/hcatalog/.

HCatalog Server

HCatalog server is the same as Hive metastore. You can just follow the Hive metastore documentation for setting it up.