SQL standard-based authorization provides fine-grained control using GRANT and REVOKE statements and supports row and column-level access with table views. Granting access to a table view is safer than granting access to the underlying table. This authorization model is disabled for the Hive command line. Secure access from the Hive CLI is not possible because users have direct access to HDFS and can bypass SQL standard-based authorization checks and even disable the authorization model. As the name suggests, this authorization model mimics traditional SQL compliant authorization in relational database systems with the GRANT and REVOKE commands. A user's privileges are checked when she runs a Hive query or command.

For more information about the ongoing work to fully support the SQL-2011 standard, see "SQL Compliance".

Administrators can grant roles as well as privileges. Users can belong to one or more roles. Two roles have special meaning:

All users belong to the public role. Administrators should use this role in GRANT statements intended to grant a privilege to all users. Administrators should add users who do the work of a database administrator to the admin role. These users have privileges to run additional commands such as CREATE ROLE and DROP ROLE, and they can access objects to which they haven't been given explicit access. However, users who belong to the admin role need to run the SET ROLE command before using the privileges of the admin role because this role is not included with the current roles by default.

The ownership of a table, view, or database determines who is authorized to perform certain actions. For example, the user who creates a table, view, or database becomes its owner. In the case of tables and views, the owner gets all the privileges with the GRANT option. Administrators can also use the ALTER DATABASE command to specify a role as the owner of a database.

SQL standard-based authorization models considers users with access to the following functionality as privileged:

These tools and commands do not access data through HiveServer2, so SQL standard-based authorization cannot authorize their access. Hortonworks recommends that administrators configure storage-based authorization on the Hive Metastore server to control access to data in Hive tables for these users. The two authorization models are compatible.

	Note
	Currently, SQL standard-based authorization does not poll groups from LDAP.