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There are two roles with special meaning – public and admin.
All users belong to the public role. You use this role in your grant statement to grant a privilege to all users.

When a user runs a Hive query or command, the privileges granted to the user and her "current roles" are checked. The current roles can be seen using the "show current roles;" command. All of the user's roles except for the admin role will be in the current roles by default, although you can use the "set role" command to set a specific role as the current role. See the command descriptions for details.

Users who do the work of a database administrator are expected to be added to the admin role.
They have privileges for running additional commands such as "create role" and "drop role". They can also access objects that they haven’t been given explicit access to. However, a user who belongs to the admin role needs to run the "set role" command before getting the privileges of the admin role, as this role is not in current roles by default.

Names of Users and Roles

Role names are case insensitive. That is, “marketing” and “MarkEting” refer to same role.

User names are case sensitive. This is because, unlike role names, user names are not managed within Hive.

Quoted Identifiers

User and role names may optionally be surrounded by back-tick characters (`) when the configuration parameter hive.support.quoted.identifiers is set to column (default value). All Unicode characters are permitted in the quoted identifiers. However when hive.support.quoted.identifiers is set to none, only alphanumeric and underscore characters are permitted in user names and role names.

For details, see HIVE-6013 and Supporting Quoted Identifiers in Column Names.

Role Management Commands

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