At LinkedIn, the Hive Metastore is the source of truth catalog for all Hadoop data. The Hive Metastore is managed by Dali. Dali is a data access and processing platform that is integrated to compute engines and ETL pipelines at LinkedIn to ensure consistency and uniformity in the access and storage of data. Dali utilizes the Hive Metastore to store data formats, data locations, partition information, and table information. Among other features, Dali also manages the definition of SQL views, as well as storing and accessing those definitions from the Hive Metastore.
Read on for a good explanation of the how as well as the why.