https://community.cloudera.com/t5/Support-Questions/upgrade-hive-schema-failed/m-p/51241#M5925 Try this out. I think you need to use the version for which you are trying to upgrade to, but you can only do that if the parcel for it has been pushed to all of the nodes already. This may help you get the exact Hive version needed for the next command.<BR /><BR />schematool -dbType mysql -info.<BR /><BR />This will generate the upgrade scripts that the wizard is running. What I would try to do is create a copy of your metastore db and then manually run scripts to see exactly were it hits the error.<BR /><BR />schematool -dbType mysql -upgradeSchemaFrom &lt;old-hive-version&gt; -dryRun<BR /><BR />It just hit me, the DB was changed but not the tables. They will keep the original charset they were created with. Once you have the problematic table(s) you can changes those with this command.<BR /><BR />I tried finding any thing for Cloudera on if you should be making a smaller jump as that is the case sometimes but I couldn't find anything. You could try that as well, see if you can upgrade to something lower like CDH 5.5.x and then going to CDH 5.10.x.<BR /><BR />ALTER TABLE tbl_name<BR />[[DEFAULT] CHARACTER SET charset_name]<BR />[COLLATE collation_name] Tue, 21 Feb 2017 16:36:45 GMT mbigelow 2017-02-21T16:36:45Z