Sqoop uses JDBC to connect to databases. JDBC is a compatibility layer that allows a program to access many different databases through a common API. Slight differences in the SQL language spoken by each database, however, may mean that Sqoop can't use every database out of the box, or that some databases may be used in an inefficient manner.

When you provide a connect string to Sqoop, it inspects the protocol scheme to determine appropriate vendor-specific logic to use. If Sqoop knows about a given database, it will work automatically. If not, you may need to specify the driver class to load via —driver. This will use a generic code path which will use standard SQL to access the database. Sqoop provides some databases with faster, non-JDBC-based access mechanisms. These can be enabled by specfying the —direct parameter.

Sqoop includes vendor-specific code paths for the following databases:

Sqoop may work with older versions of the databases listed, but we have only tested it with the versions specified above.

Even if Sqoop supports a database internally, you may still need to install the database vendor's JDBC driver in your $HADOOP_HOME/lib path.

Cloudera's Distribution for Hadoop includes JDBC drivers for HSQLDB and MySQL.