Do I need hive-metastore when I use unity catalog

Question

We have a databricks in azure portal and from the beginning we set up unity catalog. UC works fine we have schemas and tables there. By default there is also hive_metastore which is not working - we did not set up Hive metastore.

In the cluster log there is always error Metastore Down:

When I run query I can see that query stuck on this task for about 5 minutes.

performing Hive catalog operation databaseExists task.

Questions:

• do I need to set up Hive Metastore even if I will never use it because I use Unity Catalog?
• Can I somehow avoid databaseExists operation for queries?

Thanks.