Impala Shell Tool

You can use the Impala shell tool (impala-shell) to set up databases and tables, insert data, and issue queries.

For ad-hoc queries and exploration, you can submit SQL statements in an interactive session. To automate your work, you can specify command-line options to process a single statement or a script file. The impala-shell accepts all the same SQL statements, plus some shell-only commands that you can use for tuning performance and diagnosing problems.

Cloudera Manager installs impala-shell automatically. You might install impala-shell manually on other systems not managed by Cloudera Manager, so that you can issue queries from client systems that are not also running the Impala daemon or other Apache Hadoop components.