Does HCatalog require installation before being used?

Question

Can anyone please tell me that, does HCatalog require installation before using? Or it can be used just as a jar file?

I have Cloudera running on a VM, and I can use HCatalog for my MR job, Pig, Hive with no problem. And I thought the same MR code would work with another hadoop installed platform, but obviously it's not the case, exception thrown on the HCatInputFormat.setInput(). When I use Pig -useHCatalog, I'ved been prompted that the usage was wrong, meaning that it didn't know what's -useHCatalog as a parameter.

Didn't thought about this before as have been using HCatalog on Cloudera...

Answer 1

Yes, you need to install and start HCatalog server. HCatalog should come with the latest Hive tar package.

Check here of Apache Hive documentation for details,

Basically you need to,

1. Setup MySQL database for HCatalog

2. Run server install script

   share/hcatalog/scripts/hcat_server_install.sh -r root -d dbroot -h hadoop_home -p portnum

3. Start the HCatalog server

   export HIVE_HOME=hive_home $HIVE_HOME/sbin/hcat_server.sh start

Answer 2

As pointed out, you do not need to install hcatalog separately if you are working with hive 0.12 or later versions.