Considerations when using an external metastore

You can configure databases that are compatible with MariaDB JDBC as your metastore. Examples of these databases are RDS for MariaDB, MySQL, and Amazon Aurora.

Metastores aren't auto-initialized. If your metastore isn't initialized with a schema for your Hive version, use the Hive Schema Tool.

EMR Serverless doesn't support Kerberos authentication. You can't use a thrift metastore server with Kerberos authentication with EMR Serverless Spark or Hive jobs.

You must configure VPC access to use the multi-catalog hierarchy.