The Hadoop in Real World team explains what the Apache Hive architecture looks like:
Metastore database
Metastore database is not part of HiveServer2 (and it is not shown in the picture). Every Hive installation needs to have an RDBMS like Derby (good for dev environments only), Oracle or MySQL.
Hive stores the metadata of the tables and database that is managed by Hive in the metastore database. Note that this database doesn’t hold the actual data. The data will reside in HDFS.
Click through for the full architecture.