Accessing kerberized HDFS data

If your Hortonworks or Cloudera Hadoop cluster uses Kerberos authentication to restrict access to HDFS, Vertica must be granted access.

If your Hortonworks or Cloudera Hadoop cluster uses Kerberos authentication to restrict access to HDFS, Vertica must be granted access. If you use Kerberos authentication for your Vertica database, and database users have HDFS access, then you can configure Vertica to use the same principals to authenticate. However, not all Hadoop administrators want to grant access to all database users, preferring to manage access in other ways. In addition, not all Vertica databases use Kerberos.

Vertica provides the following options for accessing Kerberized Hadoop clusters:

  • Using Vertica Kerberos principals.

  • Using Hadoop proxy users combined with Vertica users.

  • Using a user-specified delegation token which grants access to HDFS. Delegation tokens are issued by the Hadoop cluster.

Proxy users and delegation tokens both use a session parameter to manage identities. Vertica need not be Kerberized when using either of these methods.

Vertica does not support Kerberos for MapR.

To test your Kerberos configuration, see Verifying HDFS configuration.

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