Cloudera Impala

How Impala Fits Into Your Big Data Workflow

Impala streamlines your Big Data workflow through a combination of flexibility and performance.

Flexibility

Impala integrates with existing Hadoop components, security, metadata, storage management, and file formats. You keep the flexibility you already have with these Hadoop strong points and add capabilities that make SQL queries much easier and faster than before.

With SQL, you can turn complicated analysis programs into simple, straightforward queries. To help answer questions and solve problems, you can enlist a wide audience of analysts who already know SQL or the standard business intelligence tools built on top of SQL. They know how to use SQL or BI tools to analyze large data sets and how to quickly get accurate answers for many kinds of business questions and “what if” scenarios. They know how to design data structures and abstractions that let you perform this kind of analysis both for common use cases and unique, unplanned scenarios.

The filtering, calculating, sorting, and formatting capabilities of SQL let you delegate those operations to the Impala query engine, rather than generating a large volume of raw results and coding client-side logic to organize the final results for presentation.

Impala embodies the Big Data philosophy that large data sets should be just as easy and economical to work with as small ones. Large volumes of data can be imported instantaneously, without any changes to the underlying data files. You have ...