Going through some patch available issues this morning I came across one that proposes adding documentation for using HCatalog features from Hive, specifically the JsonSerDe (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HCATALOG-397).
Is there a good reason for having JsonSerDe in HCatalog, or would it make sense to migrate that to Hive? A quick search shows a few other people have implemented json serde's too. HCat's implementation converts directly between HCatRecord and JSON so it couldn't be directly moved, but I'm mainly curious if at a high level moving this to Hive would make sense long-term. If we want to migrate that to Hive I think it would be better for users if we document after migrating to reduce confusion. --travis
