Users can't run "describe " if they have partial access to the table

If a user has partial access to a Hive table access via ranger policies, he/she won’t be able to run the describe statement against this table. As per screenshot below, user “yarn” has access to all columns of customer table except column “c_last_name”.

If user “yarn” tries to run “describe customer;” a Permission Denied message will be displayed.

To overcome this inconvenience, we can add “xasecure.hive.describetable.showcolumns.authorization.option=show-all” property in “Custom ranger-hive-security” section in Hive configs via ambari and restart Hive service

Once restart is done, try running the describe statement again. We should be able to see the table description.