On-demand Metadata

With the on-demand metadata feature, the Impala coordinators pull metadata as needed from catalogd and cache it locally. The cached metadata gets evicted automatically under memory pressure.

The granularity of on-demand metadata fetches is at the partition level between the coordinator and catalogd. Common use cases like add/drop partitions do not trigger unnecessary serialization/deserialization of large metadata.

The feature can be used in either of the following modes.
Metadata on-demand mode
In this mode, all coordinators use the metadata on-demand.
Set the following on catalogd:
--catalog_topic_mode=minimal
Set the following on all impalad coordinators:
--use_local_catalog=true
Mixed mode
In this mode, only some coordinators are enabled to use the metadata on-demand.
We recommend that you use the mixed mode only for testing local catalog’s impact on heap usage.
Set the following on catalogd:
--catalog_topic_mode=mixed
Set the following on impalad coordinators with metdadata on-demand:
--use_local_catalog=true 

Limitation:

Global INVALIDATE METADATA statement is not supported when this feature is enabled. If your workload requires global INVALIDATE METADATA, disable this feature.