It could be depends on data layers in your HDFS directory, for instance, if you have raw and standard layer this would be one of the practices.    Raw is the first landing of data and need to be as close to the original data as possible. Standard is the staging of the data where it converted into different data formats and still no semantic changed have been done to data.   the structure for raw data and meta is :                  raw/businessarea/sourcesystem/data/date&time                raw/businessarea/sourcesystem/meta/date&time the structure of standard data/meta folder is: standard/businessarea/sourcesystem/data/date&time                                                                         standard/businessarea/sourcesystem/meta/date&time   these standards can also help to make  sentry/ranger policies based AD groups   ... View more