Currently (as of Apr 8 2015) we have not tested the HBase metastore with the metastore service. We don't know if it works or not. We have tested it with the command line client and HiveServer2.
Not all Hive operations have been tested. Insert, select, create table, drop table, create database, add partition, drop partition have been tested. Other features may not work.

Importing metadata from rdbms to hbase

Set hive-site.xml so that it has necessary jdo properties for rdbms, and setup Hive to use hbase for metadata storage as documented above

The following command will import the metadata from the rdbms to hbase:

hive --service hbaseimport

Design Docs

...