Getting Started with Impala: Interactive SQL for Apache Hadoop

A very short introduction (plus a lot of marketing blah) written by a database guy. A few example queries, while ignoring underlying architecture. I only figured out because I know Hive. Big data is not explained well.

It's 40 pages of how great impala is without example and zero code.Not even a install steps with potential gotchas.I was not impressed. I bought the book for a technical reference. I got 40 pages of a sales pitch.

Very brief and compressed material on the subject, not worth the time or price.

This is a great book for anyone getting started w/ Imapala. It's short but packed with great insights like understanding the implications of varying file block sizes, partitioned tables, different file formats, etc.

Loved it. Was initially upset at the length of the book but it covered Impala just fine.

Hi,I have written a detailed chapter-by-chapter review of this book on www DOT i-programmer DOT info, the first and last parts of this review are given here. For my review of all chapters, search i-programmer DOT info for STIRK together with the book's title.This book aims to get you up-and-running with Impala – a tool for quickly querying Hadoop’s big data. How does it fare?It is targeted at analysts, developers and users who are new to querying Hadoop’s big data. Experience of SQL and databases would be useful, but is not mandatory. This is a short book, containing 110 pages split into five chapters.Chapter 1 Why Impala?The chapter opens with a look at Impala’s place within Hadoop’s ecosystem of components. Big data stores massive amounts of data, and querying this data is typically a batch process. Impala can often query this data within seconds or minutes at most, giving a near ‘interactive’ response. Additionally, compared with traditional big data tools like Java, Impala provides a much faster development cycle.The chapter continues with a look at how Impala readily integrates with Hadoop’s components, security, metadata, storage (HDFS), and file formats. Impala can perform complex analysis using SQL queries that can calculate, filter, sort and format.Next, it’s suggested you may need to change the way you work with big data. Previously, queries worked in batch mode, which often required a context-switch as you moved back and forth between other tasks. This view changes with Impala, which often provides a near interactive experience.The chapter ends with a look at Impala’s flexibility, able to work with raw data files, in many different formats. This means there are fewer steps than in traditional processing (i.e. no need for filtering or conversion of data), so arriving at solutions is faster.This chapter provided a useful introduction to Impala, describing what it is, what it’s used for, and giving its advantages: quick and easy development, fast queries, and integration with existing Hadoop components....ConclusionThis short book aims to get you up-and-running with Impala, and succeeds commendably. Throughout, there are helpful explanations, screenshots, practical code examples, inter-chapter references, and links to websites for further information. It’s packed with useful instructions, but some sections could benefit from more code examples.This book is suitable for analysts, developers and users that are starting out with Impala. Although aimed at the beginner, several later sections contain more advanced topics (e.g. performance). If you have a background in SQL, you will have a head start, and if you know about data warehousing, the book is even easier to understand.The world of Hadoop and its components changes frequently, so be sure to check out Impala’s latest functionality on the Cloudera site.Impala is a popular tool for querying Hadoop’s data quickly, much quicker than other tools. Additionally, the development cycle for Impala queries is much shorter than for comparable tools like Java and MapReduce processing. I would suggest Impala should be your first choice for querying data, even if the underlying data is stored in some other component (e.g. Hive).Obviously there is much more to learn about Impala than what’s given in this small book, but this book is a great place to start learning. Highly recommended.

Just an introduction but the book is great. Impala is a very good sql engine on top of hadoop and the version of the book i received it was updated to the Impala 2.x version which adds several cool features. It is an easy book to read with about 120 pages and the explanations are very interesting specially the Analytic functions in impala, which are difficult to find on the internet

It is quite incomplete...