What is essentially a Domino trip, the growth of Hadoop, as more enterprises adopt the platform, has triggered the need for a tool to help with data migration in and out of Hadoop.
“In theory, getting data into and out of Hadoop is well within the capacity of both the software and its users,” notes Serdar Yegulalp, senior writer at InfoWorld. However, “not everyone is comfortable doing the work themselves, so vendors are offering polished import/export solutions that require less manual labor.” Apache’s Sqoop deals with Hadoop import and export, providing native support for MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and HSQLDB.
A plethora of tools are available, providing data migration solutions for other, pre-existing platforms. Attunity, with its Attunity Replicate, handles Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and Teradata over Hadoop. Diyotta DataMover supports Hadoop as either a source or a target, with an equally large roster of data formats and repositories, explains Mr. Yegulalp.
Working in conjunction with Cloudera is Syncsort which picks up data directly from existing mainframes and loads it into Hadoop.
The other important aspect being “future-proofing” – “being able to work well with the changes coming down the pike for Hadoop.”
“With these offerings, the main attraction isn’t the number of supported data sources, but rather the convenience and the expertise-in-a-box approach,” Mr. Yegulalp writes. On the other hand, vendors like Hortonworks offer support and migration services, so there may be “less incentive on their part to make Sqoop into a full-blown replacement for third-party products.”
“You might not want to roll your own Sqoop import connector for a mission-critical job, but the work could pay off in the long run for a future inward migration,” expresses Yegulalp as the best bet for any future investment, “or if an option even bigger and more ambitious than Hadoop comes along.”
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