What is Hive Metastore?

Hive metastore is a database that stores metadata about your Hive tables (eg. table name, column names and types, table location, storage handler being used, number of buckets in the table, sorting columns if any, partition columns if any, etc.). When you create a table, this metastore gets updated with the information related to the new table which gets queried when you issue queries on that table.