Impala

Apache Impala is an open source massively parallel processing (MPP) SQL query engine for data stored in a computer cluster running Apache Hadoop.

Integrated into Hadoop stack on the same level as MapReduce, and not above it (process data without using MapReduce). Impala brings scalable parallel database technology to Hadoop, enabling users to issue low-latency SQL queries to data stored in HDFS and Apache HBase without requiring data movement or transformation.

Impala is promoted for analysts and data scientists to perform analytics on data stored in Hadoop via SQL or business intelligence tools. The result is that large-scale data processing (via MapReduce) and interactive queries can be done on the same system using the same data and metadata – removing the need to migrate data sets into specialized systems and/or proprietary formats simply to perform analysis.

Architecture