> Would the project not benefit in the long run if Hcat is > brought in and some day becomes the default metastore for Hive.
Folks, can we please try to keep this straight? HCatalog on its own does not provide any support for metadata. It is a set of wrapper APIs that make Hive's metastore and serdes accessible to Pig and MR. I think these wrappers provide a lot of value, and I'm eager to see them merged into Hive, but I'm dreading the marketing campaign that I suspect will follow: "Hive now supports metadata thanks to HCatalog!".
