I have been working with hive a lot and pretty much easily grasped it since its too close to SQL being me as a DB Dev earlier. I also know about the Hive metastore which is a MYSQL service storing the metadata of the Hive Tables we are creating on top of HDFS data.
But then terms HCAT and HBASE came which totally confuses me from a Hive developer point of view.
How are they related and can be used. Is it true :
HBASE : It can be used like Hive to create tables with data stored in HDFS but the only difference is it is NOSQL (can accept unstructured data and is not strict with schema and column numbers)?
HCAT : It is another service which consists of SERDE , METASTORE and is used all the time by HIVE . Hive cant work without this service since it contains metastore db ?
I am really confused. Please help.