Hive Metastore End of Life

[julius_bkr]

Hello everyone,

is there a rough date on which the Hive Metastore will be deactivated?

In the end, I ask the question again, which was already asked 2 years ago:

Solved: Hive metastore table access control End of Support - Databricks Community - 50487

Weve got many scripts that use hive metastore and are trying to plan our migration to unity catalog.

Best regards

Julius

[szymon_dybczak · Accepted solution]

HI @julius_bkr ,

There are no plans to deactivate the Hive Metastore. May I ask where you found that information? It seems to me that the Hive Metastore will be supported for many years. For example, Microsoft doesn’t support UC in GovCloud.
Plus, a lot of customers still have huge amounts of legacy pipelines that rely on the Hive Metastore.

So you can rest easy 🙂

[julius_bkr]

Hey @szymon_dybczak , 

thanks for you reply :). That's a reassuring answer. Maybe I concluded too early that this will happen at some point. The explicit marking with "Legacy" in databricks makes this effect for me. The docs (Database objects in the legacy Hive metastore | Databricks on AWS) state "... data governance using Hive metastore is deprecated. Databricks recommends that you use Unity Catalog ...", which could indicate this for me + the label "Legacy".

[Abhishek_Patel]

HI @julius_bkr I do not think Databricks has any plans to retire HMA completely. However, Unity Catalog is the strategic direction and the recommended approach for new deployments and migrating existing data governance. Databricks is investing heavily in Unity Catalog and continually adding features to it. So it would be better to migrate to UC. Without UC, you are just using the bare minimum features of Databricks, and to be able to execute advanced use cases including GenAI, and/or feature like Genie, DLT, Lakehouse Federation, Delta sharing, Cleanrooms etc. you should migrate to UC at the earliest.