Setup Standalone Hive Metastore Service For Presto and AWS S3

needing to set up hive just for the metastore seems cumbersome indeed. Have you considered using the AWS glue data catalog instead? This way you won’t have to manage anything. You can find detailed informations here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ReleaseGuide/emr-presto-glue.html

It's now available standalone /hive-standalone-metastore-3.0.0/ in the Apache Hive distribution.

Beginning in Hive 3.0, the Metastore is released as a separate package and can be run without the rest of Hive. This is referred to as standalone mode.

By default the Metastore is configured for use with Hive, so a few configuration parameters have to be changed in this configuration.

metastore.task.threads.always -> org.apache.hadoop.hive.metastore.events.EventCleanerTask,org.apache.hadoop.hive.metastore.MaterializationsCacheCleanerTask
metastore.expression.proxy -> org.apache.hadoop.hive.metastore.DefaultPartitionExpressionProxy

Link to Docs

There is a workaround, that you do not need hive to run presto. However I haven't tried that with any distributed file system like s3, but code suggest it should work (at least with HDFS). In my opinion it is worth trying, because you do not need any new docker image for hive at all.

The idea is to use a builtin FileHiveMetastore. It is neither documented nor advised to be used in production but you could play with it. Schema information is stored next to the data in the file system. Obviously, it has its prons and cons. I do not know the details of your use case, so I don't know if it fits your needs.

Configuration:

connector.name=hive-hadoop2
hive.metastore=file
hive.metastore.catalog.dir=file:///tmp/hive_catalog
hive.metastore.user=cox

Demo:

presto:tiny> create schema hive.default;
CREATE SCHEMA
presto:tiny> use hive.default;
USE
presto:default> create table t (t bigint);
CREATE TABLE
presto:default> show tables;
 Table
-------
 t
(1 row)

Query 20180223_202609_00009_iuchi, FINISHED, 1 node
Splits: 18 total, 18 done (100.00%)
0:00 [1 rows, 18B] [11 rows/s, 201B/s]

presto:default> insert into t (values 1);
INSERT: 1 row

Query 20180223_202616_00010_iuchi, FINISHED, 1 node
Splits: 51 total, 51 done (100.00%)
0:00 [0 rows, 0B] [0 rows/s, 0B/s]

presto:default> select * from t;
 t
---
 1
(1 row)

After the above I was able to find the following on my machine:

/tmp/hive_catalog/
/tmp/hive_catalog/default
/tmp/hive_catalog/default/t
/tmp/hive_catalog/default/t/.prestoPermissions
/tmp/hive_catalog/default/t/.prestoPermissions/user_cox
/tmp/hive_catalog/default/t/.prestoPermissions/.user_cox.crc
/tmp/hive_catalog/default/t/.20180223_202616_00010_iuchi_79dee041-58a3-45ce-b86c-9f14e6260278.crc
/tmp/hive_catalog/default/t/.prestoSchema
/tmp/hive_catalog/default/t/20180223_202616_00010_iuchi_79dee041-58a3-45ce-b86c-9f14e6260278
/tmp/hive_catalog/default/t/..prestoSchema.crc
/tmp/hive_catalog/default/.prestoSchema
/tmp/hive_catalog/default/..prestoSchema.crc