Overview:

Sqoop is a tool designed to help users import existing relational databases into their Hadoop clusters. Sqoop uses JDBC to connect to a database, examine the schema for tables, and auto-generate the necessary classes to import data into HDFS. It then instantiates a MapReduce job to read the table from the database via the DBInputFormat (JDBC-based InputFormat). The table is read into a set of files loaded into HDFS. Both SequenceFile and text-based targets are supported.

Longer term, Sqoop will support automatic connectivity to Hive, with the ability to load data files directly into the Hive warehouse directory, and also to inject the appropriate table definition into the metastore.