Hey @Lennart
My opinion is,
Even if Unity Catalog is disabled, Table Access Control (TAC) is off, and you’re running shared clusters with no isolation, Databricks still shows the “Permissions” buttons in the UI. That’s expected: they’re part of the default interface and don’t actually enforce anything unless Unity Catalog or legacy Hive ACLs are active. So unless you’ve configured specific permissions in Hive or UC, you can safely ignore those UI elements.
Regarding the Hive-related permission errors in your driver logs.
These messages come from internal system queries, usually triggered automatically by the catalog browser, data preview panels, or Spark background jobs like profiling. Even when TAC is off, the system might still try to validate or list permissions, especially when interacting with the metastore.
These messages are harmless in most cases and don’t block your jobs, unless there’s an actual permissions issue at the metastore or S3 level. If everything is running as expected, you can ignore them.
Hope that helps! 🙂
Isi