The Hive Metastore is simply a relational database. It stores metadata related to the tables you create to easily query Big Data stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). When a new Hive table is created, the information related to the schema (column names, data types) is stored in the Hive metastore relational database. The Hive metastore acts as a central schema repository which can be used by other access tools for Hive metadata. It is the central repository. The metadata is stored for Hive tables and partitions.