AI / Apache Paimon Interview questions
When should you choose the REST catalog over the Hive catalog?
The REST catalog gives you a single, engine-agnostic HTTP interface to a catalog's metadata, rather than requiring every client to speak the Hive Thrift protocol directly. It's the better choice when you want centralized catalog access across a heterogeneous mix of engines and languages without deploying Hive-specific client libraries everywhere, or when a managed/cloud catalog service specifically exposes a REST endpoint.
CREATE CATALOG my_catalog WITH ( 'type' = 'paimon', 'metastore' = 'rest', 'uri' = 'https://catalog.example.com' );
Choose Hive instead when your organization's tooling is already built around the Hive metastore and expects tables to be visible there natively — the REST catalog doesn't replace that integration, it's a different access pattern aimed at simpler, more portable client connectivity.
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