Page History

...

Data is defined using HCatalog's command line interface (CLI). The HCatalog CLI supports all Hive DDL that does not require MapReduce to execute, allowing users to create, alter, drop tables, etc. The CLI also supports the data exploration part of the Hive command line, such as SHOW TABLES, DESCRIBE TABLE, and so on. Unsupported Hive DDL includes import/export, the REBUILD and CONCATENATE options of ALTER TABLE, CREATE TABLE AS SELECT, and ANALYZE TABLE ... COMPUTE STATISTICS. (See Command Line Interface.)

Data Model

HCatalog presents a relational view of data. Data is stored in tables and these tables can be placed in databases. Tables can also be hash partitioned on one or more keys; that is, for a given value of a key (or set of keys) there will be one partition that contains all rows with that value (or set of values). For example, if a table is partitioned on date and there are three days of data in the table, there will be three partitions in the table. New partitions can be added to a table, and partitions can be dropped from a table. Partitioned tables have no partitions at create time. Unpartitioned tables effectively have one default partition that must be created at table creation time. There is no guaranteed read consistency when a partition is dropped.

...