Learn more
 

Ready to get started?

Download a free trial of the Impala ODBC Driver to get started:

 Download Now

Learn more:

Apache Impala Icon Impala ODBC Driver

The Impala ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live data from Impala, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access Impala data like you would a database - read, write, and update Impala data, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

In this article

Related articles

Analyze Impala Data in R


Create data visualizations and use high-performance statistical functions to analyze Impala data in Microsoft R Open.

Access Impala data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for Impala and the RODBC package to work with remote Impala data in R. By using the CData Driver, you are leveraging a driver written for industry-proven standards to access your data in the popular, open-source R language. This article shows how to use the driver to execute SQL queries to Impala data and visualize Impala data in R.

Install R

You can complement the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open (MRO).

Connect to Impala as an ODBC Data Source

Information for connecting to Impala follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.

In order to connect to Apache Impala, set the Server, Port, and ProtocolVersion. You may optionally specify a default Database. To connect using alternative methods, such as NOSASL, LDAP, or Kerberos, refer to the online Help documentation.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

Windows

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Linux

If you are installing the CData ODBC Driver for Impala in a Linux environment, the driver installation predefines a system DSN. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties.

/etc/odbc.ini

[CData ApacheImpala Source] Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Impala Description = My Description Server = 127.0.0.1 Port = 21050

For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).

Load the RODBC Package

To use the driver, download the RODBC package. In RStudio, click Tools -> Install Packages and enter RODBC in the Packages box.

After installing the RODBC package, the following line loads the package:

library(RODBC)

Note: This article uses RODBC version 1.3-12. Using Microsoft R Open, you can test with the same version, using the checkpoint capabilities of Microsoft's MRAN repository. The checkpoint command enables you to install packages from a snapshot of the CRAN repository, hosted on the MRAN repository. The snapshot taken Jan. 1, 2016 contains version 1.3-12.

library(checkpoint) checkpoint("2016-01-01")

Connect to Impala Data as an ODBC Data Source

You can connect to a DSN in R with the following line:

conn <- odbcConnect("CData ApacheImpala Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models Impala APIs as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. Use the following line to retrieve the list of tables:

sqlTables(conn)

Execute SQL Queries

Use the sqlQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the Impala API.

customers <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT City, CompanyName FROM Customers WHERE Country = 'US'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:

View(customers)

Plot Impala Data

You can now analyze Impala data with any of the data visualization packages available in the CRAN repository. You can create simple bar plots with the built-in bar plot function:

par(las=2,ps=10,mar=c(5,15,4,2)) barplot(customers$CompanyName, main="Impala Customers", names.arg = customers$City, horiz=TRUE)