Once connected to a database server, you can list the available databases with the —list-databases parameter. This currently is supported only by HSQLDB and MySQL. Note that in this case, the connect string does not include a database name, just a server address.

$ sqoop --connect jdbc:mysql://database.example.com/ --list-databases
information_schema
employees

This only works with HSQLDB and MySQL. A vendor-agnostic implementation of this function has not yet been implemented.