@SparkNewbie  Bingo you are using the derby DB, which is only recommended for testing.   There are three modes for Hive Metastore deployment: Embedded Metastore Local Metastore Remote Metastore In Hive by default, metastore service runs in the same JVM as the Hive service. It uses embedded derby database stored on the local file system in this mode. Thus both metastore service and hive service runs in the same JVM by using embedded Derby Database. But, this mode also has its limitation that, as only one embedded Derby database can access the database files on disk at any one time, so only one Hive session could be open at a time. 21/07/07 23:07:56 INFO MetaStoreDirectSql: Using direct SQL, underlying DB is DERBY Derby is an embedded relational database in Java program and used for online transaction processing and has a 3.5 MB disk-space footprint. Depending on your software HDP or Cloudera ensure the hive DB is plugged to an external Mysql database For CDH using Mysql  For HDP using mysql  Check your current hive UI backend metadata databases !! After installing MySQL then you should toggle hive config to point to the external Mysql database .. Once done your commands and the refresh should succeed Please let me know if you need help Happy hadooping   ... View more