Query Hive Meta Store

Question

I want to know how to query the hive metastore database and grab a few key properties including:

• create date
• last update date
• last access date

Answer 1

From Java code you can query the Hive Metastore directly - cf. JavaDoc

Or, if you like quick-and-dirty tricks, you can connect to the Metastore database (typically a MySQL instance) and run some SQL queries directly against it. Not much public documentation about the data model, unfortunately.