In addition to providing you with a dependable release of Hadoop that is easy to configure, at Cloudera we also focus on developing tools to extend Hadoop’s usability, and make Hadoop a more central component of your data infrastructure. In this vein, we’re proud to announce the availability of Sqoop, a tool designed to easily import information from SQL databases into your Hadoop cluster.

Sqoop (“SQL-to-Hadoop”) is a straightforward command-line tool with the following capabilities:

Hadoop’s strength is that it enables ad-hoc analysis of unstructured or semi-structured data. Relational databases, by contrast, allow for fast queries of very structured data sources. A point of frustration has been the inability to easily query both of these sources at the same time. The DBInputFormat component provided in Hadoop 0.19 finally allows easy import and export of data between Hadoop and many relational databases, allowing relational data to be more easily incorporated into your data processing pipeline.

This blog post explains how the DBInputFormat works and provides an example of using DBInputFormat to import data into HDFS.

DBInputFormat and JDBC

First we’ll cover how DBInputFormat interacts with databases. DBInputFormat uses JDBC to connect to data sources. Because JDBC is widely implemented, DBInputFormat can work with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and several other database systems. Individual database vendors provide JDBC drivers to allow third-party applications (like Hadoop) to connect to their databases. Links to popular drivers are listed in the resources section at the end of this post.