Impala

What Does Impala Mean?

Impala is a type of software tool that is known as a query engine. It is licensed by Apache and runs on the open-source Apache Hadoop big data analytics platform.

Techopedia Explains Impala

The Cloudera company, an IT vendor, promotes Impala as an open-source product that gives users the ability to perform Hadoop queries in real time, using easy commands that are conventional in database queries. Users can utilize the Impala tool to search data stored in Hadoop HDFS or in other structures like HBase.

Part of the specifics around the Impala tool involve how it works with MapReduce, which is a batch-processing element of Hadoop. The makers of Impala explain that the program works around MapReduce for direct access to data. They also contrast this tool with Apache Hive, another open-source data analysis tool offered by the Apache Foundation, and claim that Impala can be quite a bit faster, while some network bottlenecks are eliminated.

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Margaret Rouse

Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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