Question about Hive Metastore and AWS Glue Federation in Unity Catalog

[hzh]

Hello,

Very excited to see the UC federation for hive and aws glue are now in public review. I have a workspace with hive metastore and it integrates with AWS glue (https://docs.databricks.com/en/archive/external-metastores/aws-glue-metastore.html). There are downstream pipelines in AWS consume tables registed with AWS Glue. The workspace was created 4 years ago and I understand this is considered as 'legacy' setup now.

In this scenario, when creating connection for UC federation, the connection type is Hive metastore, and what the metastore type should be? Is it Internal? Or AWS Glue?

Also, the federation supports both reading and writing to tables in internal HMS and only supports read-only access for tables AWS Glue, so if i have hive metastore integrated with AWS glue, can i do both read and write to tables?

Thanks

[Alberto_Umana]

Hello @hzh,

Thanks for your question!

UC Federation Connection Type and Metastore Type

When creating a connection for UC federation with a Hive metastore integrated with AWS Glue, the connection type should be Hive metastore.

Metastore Type

• If the Hive metastore is integrated with AWS Glue, the metastore type should be AWS Glue.

Read and Write Access

• UC federation supports both reading and writing to tables in the internal Hive Metastore (HMS).
• For tables in AWS Glue, UC federation supports read-only access.

Therefore, if you have a Hive metastore integrated with AWS Glue, you can do both read and write to tables in the internal HMS, but only read access to tables in AWS Glue.