The Metadata Access Service contains information about the Service Principal Name (SPN) and keytab information if the Hadoop cluster uses Kerberos authentication. You can create one or more Metadata Access Services on a node. Based on your license, the Metadata Access Service can be highly available.

The following Informatica products use the Metadata Access Service to extract metadata at design time:

Big Data Management
PowerExchange for HBase
PowerExchange for HDFS
PowerExchange for Hive
PowerExchange for MapR-DB
Big Data Parser
Big Data Quality
Big Data Streaming
MapRStreams Connection

Create a Metadata Access Service before you import HBase, HDFS, Hive, MapR-DB, and MapRStreams objects from a Hadoop distribution. The Metadata Access Service is not used at run time. When you run HBase, HDFS, Hive, or, MapRStreams mappings, the Data Integration Service communicates with the Hadoop distribution and performs the data integration task.