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See details in the HCatalog Storage Based Authorization document.
Starting in hive 0.14, storage based authorization authorizes read privilege on database and tables. get_database api call needs database directory read privilege. get_table_* calls that fetch table information and get_partition_* calls to list the partitions of a table require read privilege on the table directory. It is enabled by default with Storagebased authorization. Set hive.security.metastore.authorization.auth.reads in the section on configuration.
Configuration Parameters for Metastore Security
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