The base of the catalog feature made it into Hive 3, though it's not very usable yet since it is only in the metastore. I plan to keep working on this feature to add it to the rest of Hive. The (ever growing) set of tasks for doing this is tracked in HIVE-18685.
I believe this should get pushed into branch-3 since the beginning of the feature is in 3 and it will likely be a year or more before there's a Hive 4. Since branch-3 currently has a number of test failures I won't start pushing patches yet, but once it stabilizes I'd like to push this feature into branch-3. Any concerns? Alan.
