AI / Apache Paimon Interview questions
What are the four types of metastores Paimon catalogs support?
Paimon catalogs currently support four metastore backends, each storing metadata differently:
| Metastore | Behavior |
| filesystem (default) | Stores both metadata and table files in the filesystem itself. |
| hive | Additionally stores metadata in the Hive metastore, so tables are directly visible from Hive. |
| jdbc | Additionally stores metadata in a relational database such as MySQL or Postgres. |
| rest | Provides a lightweight way to access any catalog backend through a single REST client. |
Choosing one over another is mostly about which system already owns your table metadata — teams already standardized on Hive or a JDBC store can plug Paimon straight in rather than maintaining a second source of truth.
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