Hcatalog in HIVE

Question

What is the use if Hcatalog in HIVE? I know it works as a storage management layer for Hadoop. But I don't know how exactly it works?
Help Needed.

Answer 1

HCatalog supports reading and writing files in any format for which a Hive SerDe (serializer-deserializer) can be written. By default, HCatalog supports RCFile, CSV, JSON, and SequenceFile formats. To use a custom format, you must provide the InputFormat, OutputFormat, and SerDe.

HCatalog is built on top of the Hive metastore and incorporates components from the Hive DDL. HCatalog provides read and write interfaces for Pig and MapReduce and uses Hive’s command line interface for issuing data definition and metadata exploration commands.

It also presents a REST interface to allow external tools access to Hive DDL (Data Definition Language) operations, such as “create table” and “describe table”.

HCatalog presents a relational view of data. Data is stored in tables and these tables can be placed into databases. Tables can also be partitioned on one or more keys. For a given value of a key (or set of keys) there will be one partition that contains all rows with that value (or set of values).

Hope this helps.