Hive OCF Connector: Overview

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

The OCF connector for Hive was developed by Alation and is available as a Zip file that can be uploaded and installed in the Alation application. The connector is compiled together with the required database driver, so no additional effort is needed to procure and install the driver.

To download the Hive OCF connector package, go to the Alation Connector Hub available from the Customer Portal. Go to Customer Portal > Connectors > Alation Connector Hub. Only Alation users with access to the Customer Portal can access the Alation Connector Hub. If you don’t have access to the Customer Portal, contact Alation Support.

This connector should be used to catalog Hive as a data sources on Alation on-prem and Cloud Service instances. It extracts and catalogs such database objects as schemas, tables, views, and columns. After the metadata is extracted, it is represented in the data catalog as a hierarchy of catalog pages under the data source. Alation users can leverage the full catalog functionality to search for the extracted metadata, curate the corresponding catalog pages, create documentation about the data source, and exchange information about it.

Note

For information about the supported Hive distributions and versions, refer to Support Matrices.

Team

You may need the assistance of your Hive administrator to configure this data source.

  • Alation administrator:

    • Ensures that Alation Connector Manager is installed and running or installs it.

    • Installs the OCF connector.

    • Creates and configures the Hive data source in the catalog.

    • Performs initial extraction and prepares the data source for Alation users.

  • Hive administrator:

    • Creates a service account for Alation and provides access to metadata.

    • Provides the JDBC URI.

    • Provides the Hive client configuration files.

    • Provides the SSL certificate.

Scope

The table below describes which metadata objects are extracted by this connector and which operations are supported.

Hive 2

Hive 3

Platform

CDH

EMR

MapR

HDP

EMR

CDP

Azure HDInsight

Engine

MR

MR

MR

Tez

Tez

Tez

Tez

Authentication

Basic

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Kerberos with keytabs

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

n/a

Knox LDAP

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

ZooKeeper URL

Yes

n/a

n/a

Yes

No

Yes

No

SASL

Yes

No

n/a

Yes

n/a

No

n/a

Azure Encryption

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

Yes

HttpFS Kerberos

Yes

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

Wire-level security

n/a

n/a

Yes

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

MapR SASL

n/a

n/a

Yes

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

Metadata extraction (default MDE)

Data source

Yes

Schema

Yes

Table

Yes

View

Yes

Column

Yes

Primary keys

No

Foreign keys

No

Source comments

Schema, Table, Table-Column, View, and View-Column source comments are extracted.

Popularity

Yes

Sampling and profiling

Table sampling

Yes

Column sampling

Yes

Custom query-based table sampling

Yes

Custom query-based column profiling

Yes

Query log ingestion

File-based QLI

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

No

No

Lineage

Table-level Lineage

Yes

Yes

No

No

No

No

No

Column-level Lineage

No

Compose

Customer-managed (on-prem) Alation instances

Yes

Alation Cloud Service instances, connection without Agent

Yes

Alation Cloud Service instances, connection via Agent

No

Limitations

  1. Table sampling and column profiling of columns of type union results in the error Unrecognized column type: UNIONTYPE. This is an Apache Hive known issue.

  2. MapR with Kerberos is not a supported configuration.

  3. Compose does not work with Kerberos authentication (only basic authentication is supported).

  4. Partition keys will be shown in the user interface only if a comment was added while creating the partition.