I know the question is a little bit strange. I love Hadoop & HDFS, but recently work on SparkSQL with Hive Metastore.
I want to use SparkSQL as a vertical SQL engine to run OLAP query across different datasources like RDB, Mongo, Elastic ... without ETL process. Then I register different schema as external tables in Metastore with corresponding Hive storage Handler.
Moreover, HDFS is not used as a datasource in my work. Then, given Map/R is already replaced by Spark engine. That sound to me that Hadoop/HDFS is useless but to base the installation of Hive. I don't want to buy them all.
I wonder If I only start Hive metastore service without Hadoop/HDFS to support SparkSQL, what kind of issue will happen. Would I put myself into the jungle?
What you need is "Hive Local Mode" (search for "Hive, Map-Reduce and Local-Mode" in the page).
Also this may help.
This configuration is only suggested if you are experimenting locally. But in this case you only need the metastore.
Also from here;
Spark SQL uses Hive Metastore, even if when we don't configure it to . When not configured it uses a default Derby DB as metastore.
So this seems to be quite legal;