# Centralizing HCatalog metadata

Available in...

* Big Data
* Big Data Platform
* Cloud Big Data
* Cloud Big Data Platform
* Cloud Data Fabric
* Data Fabric
* Qlik Talend Cloud Enterprise Edition
* Qlik Talend Cloud Premium Edition
* Real-Time Big Data Platform

If you often need to use a table from HCatalog, a table and storage management layer for Hadoop, then you may want to centralize the connection information to a given HCatalog and the table schema details in the Metadata folder in the Repository tree view.

Prerequisites:

* Launch the HortonWorks Hadoop distribution you need to use and ensure that you have the proper access permission to that distribution and its HCatalog.

* Create the connection to that Hadoop distribution from the Hadoop cluster node. For further information, see [Centralizing a Hadoop connection](https://help.qlik.com/talend/en-US/studio-user-guide/8.0/centralizing-hadoop-connection).

### In this section

* [Creating a connection to HCatalog](https://help.qlik.com/talend/en-US/studio-user-guide/8.0-R2026-09/creating-connection-to-hcatalog)
* [Retrieving a Hcatalog table schema](https://help.qlik.com/talend/en-US/studio-user-guide/8.0-R2026-09/retrieving-hcatalog-table-schema)