We workaround a limitation in Spark that doesn't allow ALTER TABLE CHANGE COLUMN statements by issuing the DDL through a manually created Hive JDBC connection, instead of through spark.sql(). This recently caused a bug: T209407: EventLogging Hive Refine broken after upgrade to CDH 5.15.0. We should fix this by submitting a fix for https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-23890 in Apache Spark upstream.
WIP Pull Request here: https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/21012
If we do this, I believe that event schema column descriptions/comments will finally make their way into the Hive tables, and then up into DataHub.