Apache Sqoop Cookbook: Unlocking Hadoop for Your Relational Database 1st Edition

I read this book in an afternoon, as my first intro to Sqoop. I didn't want to read an entire reference manual to get familiar with what Sqoop could do, and by reading the various recipes presented in this book, I definitely got the overview I wanted, in order to quickly evaluate whether or not to incorporate Sqoop into my technology stack. Not only did I get to evaluate the tool at a high level, I think I also have a good foundation for how to implement exactly what I want to do with it.

This book was very helpful when I needed to import data from MySQL into a S3-backed Hive data warehouse using an Oozie workflow, lots of the little recipes helped to get my job done way quicker than I would've imagined. I definitely recommend anyone interested in bulk loading data from a relational database into the Hadoop world to get this book.

The book is very nicely written, the author has done a great job explaining the concept.... I was able to write some complex data extraction jobs just from the knowledge gained by reading the book.

Disclosure: I know Kathleen because we worked together fairly closely at Cloudera for a year or so.Disclosure: Further, through the use of my extremely good looks and Midwestern charm, I wheedled a free copy of this book from Kathleen when I bumped into her earlier this week. She didn't have a chance.This book is an excellent quick introduction for getting quickly up and running with Sqoop. There is a cursory section on installing it and grabbing the jdbc driver(s) then it's all about the vagaries of moving data back and forth between HDFS and your RDBMS.Personally I like the structure of the book. Each "recipe" in the cookbook states a problem, then states the solution (with a working example), then there is a brief discussion explaining why and how this solution works. Most of these sections build on the previous examples.So by reading it in order you get a very logical and step-by-step understanding of how Sqoop works along with at least one working example for each step. You could work through the examples on your laptop (code is on Github) as you go through the book for a deeper understanding.It is also possible to use this book by finding your problem in the table of contents and flipping right to that section.Other people may have different styles of learning, so for them there is the documentation on the Apache site or the section in Hadoop: The Definitive Guide on Sqoop. But with the Hadoop ecosystem I find that so much of getting it to work is trial and error, so having practical working examples is worth the price of the book.

TOC looks good. However, the main question now is whether this book is updated for Sqoop2 - a major architectural re-design. For starter, client-side installation is eliminated. Connectors are also moved away from the JDBC paradigm. Given that the author is an insider, and Sqoop2 was well near GA in 2012 (the author herself blogged about it in Jan, 2012 - https://blogs.apache.org/sqoop/entry/apache_sqoop_highlights_of_sqoop), one would expect so. However, the book blurb and extracts give no indication at all.If the book is Sqoop2-compliant, I will buy it. If not, then not. Not knowing this, I can only give 3 stars as a compromise.

Best book to hit the ground running with Apache Sqoop.

Don't bother. The very first script requires a driver to be installed into Sqoop but the authors glean over the topic as an afterthought. Without the 'little' piece of code installed in Sqoop, NOTHING else works. This book was a complete waste of money.

Good book with all required information.