////
  Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
  or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
  distributed with this work for additional information
  regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
  to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
  "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
  with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 
      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 
  Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
  distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
  WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
  See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
  limitations under the License.
////


Introduction
------------

Sqoop is a tool designed to transfer data between Hadoop and
relational databases. You can use Sqoop to import data from a
relational database management system (RDBMS) such as MySQL or Oracle
into the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), 
transform the data in Hadoop MapReduce, and then export the data back
into an RDBMS.

Sqoop automates most of this process, relying on the database to
describe the schema for the data to be imported. Sqoop uses MapReduce
to import and export the data, which provides parallel operation as
well as fault tolerance.

This document describes how to get started using Sqoop to move data
between databases and Hadoop and provides reference information for
the operation of the Sqoop command-line tool suite. This document is
intended for:

- System and application programmers
- System administrators
- Database administrators
- Data analysts
- Data engineers