Integrating the Hive Metastore with Apache Kudu

You can integrate Kudu's own catalog with the Hive Metastore (HMS) allowing external HMS-aware tool to discover and use Kudu tables.

The HMS is the de-facto standard catalog and metadata provider in the Hadoop ecosystem. When the HMS integration is enabled, Kudu tables can be discovered and used by external HMS-aware tools, even if they are not otherwise aware of, or integrated with Kudu. There is no need to create Impala external tables to map any Kudu tables created directly using API or from Spark. Additionally, these components can use the HMS to discover necessary information to connect to the Kudu cluster which owns the table, such as the Kudu master addresses.