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The default authorization model of Hive supports a traditional RDBMS style of authorization based on users, groups and roles and granting them permissions to do operations on database or table. It is described in more detail in Hive Authorization and Hive deprecated authorization mode / Legacy Mode.

This RDBMS style of authorization is not very suitable for the typical use cases in Hadoop because of the following differences in implementation:

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In Hive, when a file system is used for storage, there is a directory corresponding to a database or a table. With this authorization model, the read/write permissions a user or group has for this directory determine the permissions a user has on the database or table. In the case of other storage systems such as HBase, the authorization of equivalent entities in the system will be done using the system’s authorization mechanism to determine the permissions in Hive.

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When the database or table is backed by a file system that has a Unix/POSIX-style permissions model (like HDFS), there are read(r) and write(w) permissions you can set for the owner user, group and ‘other’. The file system’s logic for determining if a user has permission on the directory or file will be used by Hive.

Details of HDFS permissions are given at http://hadoop.apache.org/docs/rx.x.x/hdfs_permissions_guide.html, for example:

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Note: Support for HDFS ACL (introduced in Apache Hadoop 2.4) is yet to be added to this model. Which not available in the released versions of Hive.  Which means, that it checks only the traditional rwx style permissions to determine if a user can write to the file system. The support for ACL is available in Hive trunk HIVE-7583, which will be available in Hive 0.14.  

Links to documentation for different releases of Hadoop can be found here: http://hadoop.apache.org/docs/.

Note: If hive.warehouse.subdir.inherit.perms is enabled, permissions and ACL's for Hive-created files and directories will be set via the following permission inheritance rules.

The file system’s logic for determining if a user has permission on the directory or file will be used by Hive. 

Minimum Permissions

The following table shows the minimum permissions required for Hive operations under this authorization model:

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The implementation of the file-system based authorization model is available through an authorization provider called StorageBasedAuthorizationProvider that is part of Hive. (Support for this was added to the Hive package in release 0.10.0 – see HIVE-3705 and and Storage Based Authorization in the Metastore Server Security in the Hive documentation.)

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