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In the HCatalog package, we have introduced implementation of an authorization interface that uses the permissions of the underlying file system (or in general, the storage backend) as the basis of permissions on each database, table or partition.

In Hive, when a file system is used for storage, there is a directory corresponding to a database or a table. With this authorization model, the read/write permissions a user or group has for this directory determine the permissions a user has on the database or table. In the case of other storage systems such as HBase, the authorization of equivalent entities in the system will be done using the system’s authorization mechanism to determine the permissions in Hive.

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The implementation of the file-system based authorization model is available in the HCatalog package. (Support for this is likely to be was added to the Hive package in the futurerelease 0.10.0 – see HIVE-3705 and Metastore Server Security in the Hive documentation.) So using this implementation requires installing the HCatalog package along with Hive.

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