Sqoop currently does not support column name mapping. However, the user is allowed to override the type mapping. Type mapping loosely follows the Hive type mapping already present in Sqoop except that the SQL types FLOAT and REAL are mapped to the HCatalog type “float.” In the Sqoop type mapping for Hive, these two SQL types are mapped to “double.” Type mapping is primarily used for checking the column definition correctness only and can be overridden with the --map-column-hive option.

All types except binary are assignable to a string type.

Any field of number type (int, shortint, tinyint, bigint and bigdecimal, float and double) is assignable to another field of any number type during exports and imports. Depending on the precision and scale of the target type of assignment, truncations can occur.

Furthermore, date/time/timestamps are mapped to string (the full date/time/timestamp representation) or bigint (the number of milliseconds since epoch) during imports and exports.

BLOBs and CLOBs are only supported for imports. The BLOB/CLOB objects when imported are stored in a Sqoop-specific format and knowledge of this format is needed for processing these objects in a Pig/Hive job or another Map Reduce job.

Database column names are mapped to their lowercase equivalents when mapped to the HCatalog fields. Currently, case-sensitive database object names are not supported.

Projection of a set of columns from a table to an HCatalog table or loading to a column projection is allowed (subject to table constraints). The dynamic partitioning columns, if any, must be part of the projection when importing data into HCatalog tables.

Dynamic partitioning fields should be mapped to database columns that are defined with the NOT NULL attribute (although this is not validated). A null value during import for a dynamic partitioning column will abort the Sqoop job.