Hue Hive — Beeswax Server Can't Find JDBC Driver for MySQL

Question

We're using the Cloudera 3.7.5 and having a tough time configuring the Beeswax server such that the Hue can access the Hive databases. I followed all the instructions from the Cloudera documentation that to setup MySQL to serve as Hive's metastore, but when I restart the Hue services and check Beeswax server's StdErr logs, I still see the painful "javax.jdo.JDOFatalInternalException: Error creating transactional connection factory" which is caused by

org.datanucleus.exceptions.NucleusException: Attempt to invoke the "DBCP" plugin to create a ConnectionPool gave an error : The specified datastore driver ("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver") was not found in the CLASSPATH. Please check your CLASSPATH specification, and the name of the driver.

This is bizzare to me, because the logs also indicate that the environment variable HIVE_HOME is equal to "/usr/lib/hive", and sure enough I have copied the "mysql-connector-java-5.1.15-bin.jar" into the /usr/lib/hive/lib directory, as the documents dictate.

I have also tried the instructions on the blog post http://hadoopchallenges.blogspot.com/2011/03/hue-120-upgrade-and-beeswax.html, which involved copying the the mysql-connector jar into "/usr/share/hue/apps/beeswax/hive/lib/". Unfortunately I did not have a hive/lib subdirectory in the beeswax folder, so I attempted to make one. This also did not work.

Any advice how I can get the MySQL JDBC library onto Beeswax's classpath?

Answer 1

We finally decided to just bite the bullet and upgrade to CDH4. Placing the JDBC jar in /usr/share/hive/lib allowed the Beeswax server to function perfectly without issue.

If anyone else is experiencing this issue I recommend upgrading from CDH3 to CDH4, the UI is much cleaner, smoother, and we had much fewer installation and maintenance bugs with CDH4.

Answer 2

You have to paste your mysql connector in HUE_HOME/apps/beeswax/hive/lib. If this path doesn't exist, create hive/lib and then paste the mysql connector. I hope your problem will be solved.

Answer 3

When you start using cloudera 4.5 they move everything into parcels, so this exact problem on my hive meta server was fixed by this command (below). Essentially you're just re-adding modules. I'm sure you can modify the extra classpath in the hive config file to make this oblivious to parcel updates.

cp /usr/lib/hive/lib/mysql-connector-java-5.1.17-bin.jar /opt/cloudera/parcels/CDH-4.2.0-1.cdh4.2.0.p0.10/lib/hive/lib/.

So a real fix might be something like this:

 cp `locate mysql-connector | grep jar | head -n 1` /opt/cloudera/parcels/*/lib/hive/lib/.

which would copy the jar into every parcel.