hi, We're starting to look into HCatalog to see if it can help us organize and catalog our data/schemas owned by various groups across our organization. As a result I have a few questions about some functionality that I don't think exists yet, but I could be mistaken (it's been a while since I last worked with Hive).
If these aren't currently supported, would there be interest in including these features in the roadmap? If so we might be able to contribute resources to help implement some of them. - Custom table and field metadata Is it possible to annotate a table or columns with custom key/value metadata (i.e. table POCs, descriptions, column data formats, etc)? This Howl wiki (http://wiki.apache.org/pig/owl) had a one-liner about custom table metadata, but that's the only reference I've been able to find about this. - Support for non-RDMS metadata storage We have groups that currently store a custom schema definition file in HDFS along side of their actual data. Would it be possible to direct HCatalog to consult this file instead of the DB for the schema info for this class of tables? - Web UI Are there any know web UIs (or plans for one) to expose and even modify HCatalog data? We'd like to build a web UI that would help with data discovery. IIRC, facebook had something similar at one point. - Support for columnar DBs (i.e., HBase) I know this doesn't exist currently, but is this something being considered or requested? HCatalog is focused on fixed-width schemas, so this would be tricky to represent, but it seems worth exploring. There seems to be an emerging need to effectively manage and understand the schemas of such schema-less data stores. :) thanks, Bill
