@Jan Horton WebHCat orignally named as Templeton is a REST API for HCatalog and related Hadoop components. HCatalog,Sub-‐component of Hive which serve table meta information acrooss hadoop computation engines like mapreduce,pig, hive etc,it sPublic APIs and webservice wrappers for accessing metadata in Hive metastore,WebHCat actully exppose these information through REST webservices. it also allow user to submit(queue) hadoop streamig,hadoop mapreduce,pig and hive job to the cluster but it is not ideal to regular analytical processing as it only queues the job and don't return you a query results. Hiveserver2 is another hive component which is basically a thrift service which support multiple concurrent clients connecting through JDBC/ODBC.ideal for big analytical workload
further to this you can read along https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/HiveServer2+Clients
... View more
