Types of Sqoop connectors

Sqoop connectors can be broadly classified as below:

• Built-in connectors: Connectors which ship along with the default Sqoop installation are categorized in this. Built-in connectors can again be sub-categorized as follows:
  • Generic JDBC connector: This connector can be used to connect to any database system complying with JDBC and SQL. Sqoop chooses this connector as a last resort when it is not able to find any other connector (default or manually installed).
  • Specialized connectors: These are connectors included by default along with Sqoop installation for all the popular database management systems. Some of the example connectors falling into this category are Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and so on.
  • Fast-path connectors: Specialized built-in connector which use database specific tools to better perform the data transfer option fall into this category. MySQL and PostgreSQL have such native tool based connectors which does have better performance and throughput purely by the merit of being native.
• Pluggable external connectors: As against built-in default connectors, Sqoop does allow plugging in external connectors dealing with appropriate datasource to better do the data transfer and these connectors fall into this category. These are specialized connectors, mostly supplied and maintained by the database providers. Being managed by the provider themselves, these usually are highly performant and use different database native tools to do the data transfer job. Connectors dealing with different NoSQL databases are readily available, such as Couchbase connector.