Sqoop Features and Limitations
Eager to learn features of Apache Sqoop? In this Sqoop Features article, you will explore all the key-features of Sqoop in detail. Apache Sqoop is a Hadoop ecosystem component that has various advantages.
It is used basically for importing data to and exporting data from HDFS to Relational Databases. With Sqoop, we can import the whole table into HDFS just with a single command. Sqoop offers many features like support for Accumulo, Kerberos security, incremental load, and many more.
The article has enlisted all the Sqoop features. In this article, you will also explore some of the limitations of Apache Sqoop. The article first provides the Sqoop introduction before enlisting Sqoop features to brush up your knowledge.
Introduction to Apache Sqoop
Sqoop is a tool designed by Apache Software Foundation for efficiently transferring bulkier data in between Hadoop Distributed storage and external datastores like relational databases, enterprise data warehouses.
It is used mainly to import data from relational database servers into the HDFS or to other related Hadoop ecosystem components like HBase and Hive.
We can use Sqoop for extracting data from Hadoop Distributed File System or its ecosystem components and exporting it to the external datastores like enterprise data warehouses, relational databases.
Apache Sqoop can work with various relational databases like Oracle, MySQL, Teradata, Netezza, Postgres etc.
Features of Apache Sqoop
The various key features of Apache Sqoop are:
1. Robust: Apache Sqoop is highly robust in nature. It has community support and contribution and is easily usable.
2. Full Load: Using Sqoop, we can load a whole table just by a single Sqoop command. Sqoop also allows us to load all the tables of the database by using a single Sqoop command.
3. Incremental Load: Sqoop supports incremental load functionality. Using Sqoop, we can load parts of the table whenever it is updated.
4. Parallel import/export: Apache Sqoop uses the YARN framework for importing and exporting the data. This provides fault tolerance on the top of parallelism.
5. Import results of SQL query: Sqoop also allows us to import the result returned from the SQL query into Hadoop Distributed File System.
6. Compression: We can compress our data either by using the deflate(gzip) algorithm with the –compress argument or by specifying the –compression-codec argument. We can load a compressed table in Apache Hive.
7. Connectors for all the major RDBMS Databases: Sqoop provides connectors for various RDBMS databases, covering almost all of the entire circumference.
8. Kerberos Security Integration: Basically, Kerberos is the computer network authentication protocol which works on the basis of the ‘tickets’ for allowing nodes that are communicating over the non-secure network to prove their identity to each other. Apache Sqoop provides support for Kerberos authentication.
9. Load data directly into HIVE/HBase: Using Sqoop, we can load the data directly into the Hive for data analysis. We can also dump our data in the HBase, that is, the NoSQL database.
10. Support for Accumulo: We can instruct Apache Sqoop to import a table in Accumulo instead of importing them in a directory in HDFS.
Limitations of Sqoop
Some of the limitations of Apache Sqoop are:
1. We cannot pause or resume Apache Sqoop. It is an atomic step.
2. The performance of the Sqoop Export depends on the hardware configuration of the RDBMS server.
3. Sqoop uses the MapReduce paradigm in backend processing due to which it is slow.
4. The failures during partial import and export need special handling.
5. For some of the databases, Apache Sqoop provides bulkier connectors.
Summary
After reading this article, I hope you are now able to understand the various salient features of Apache Sqoop that make it famous. You have also learned some of the limitations of Apache Sqoop.
It is the Hadoop ecosystem component and is used to transfer bulkier data between Hadoop Distributed File System and Relational Databases.
If you have any queries related to Sqoop then, feel free to share it with us in the comment section. Follow this Sqoop tutorial series to master Apache Sqoop.