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Components of Impala

The Impala service is a distributed, massively parallel processing (MPP) database engine. It consists of different daemon processes that run on specific hosts within your Hadoop cluster.

Impala service consists of the following categories of processes, referred as roles.

Impala Daemon
The core Impala component is the Impala daemon, physically represented by the impalad process. A few of the key functions that an Impala daemon performs are:
  • Reads and writes to data files.
  • Accepts queries transmitted from the impala-shell command, Hue, JDBC, or ODBC.
  • Parallelizes the queries and distributes work across the cluster.
  • Transmits intermediate query results back to the central coordinator.
Impala daemons can be deployed in one of the following ways:
  • HDFS and Impala are co-located, and each Impala daemon runs on the same host as a DataNode.
  • Impala is deployed separately in a compute cluster and reads remotely from HDFS, S3, ADLS, etc.

The Impala daemons are in constant communication with StateStore, to confirm which daemons are healthy and can accept new work.

They also receive broadcast messages from the Catalog Server daemon whenever an Impala daemon in the cluster creates, alters, or drops any type of object, or when an INSERT or LOAD DATA statement is processed through Impala. This background communication minimizes the need for REFRESH or INVALIDATE METADATA statements that were needed to coordinate metadata across Impala daemons.

You can control which hosts act as query coordinators and which act as query executors, to improve scalability for highly concurrent workloads on large clusters.

Impala StateStore

The Impala StateStore checks on the health of all Impala daemons in a cluster, and continuously relays its findings to each of those daemons. It is physically represented by a daemon process named statestored. You only need such a process on one host in a cluster. If an Impala daemon goes offline due to hardware failure, network error, software issue, or other reason, the StateStore informs all the other Impala daemons so that future queries can avoid making requests to the unreachable Impala daemon.

Because the StateStore's purpose is to help when things go wrong and to broadcast metadata to coordinators, it is not always critical to the normal operation of an Impala cluster. If the StateStore is not running or becomes unreachable, the Impala daemons continue running and distributing work among themselves as usual when working with the data known to Impala. The cluster just becomes less robust if other Impala daemons fail, and metadata becomes less consistent as it changes while the StateStore is offline. When the StateStore comes back online, it re-establishes communication with the Impala daemons and resumes its monitoring and broadcasting functions.

If you issue a DDL statement while the StateStore is down, the queries that access the new object the DDL created will fail.

Impala Catalog Server

The Catalog Server relays the metadata changes from Impala SQL statements to all the Impala daemons in a cluster. It is physically represented by a daemon process named catalogd. You only need such a process on one host in a cluster. Because the requests are passed through the StateStore daemon, it makes sense to run the statestored and catalogd services on the same host.

The catalog service avoids the need to issue REFRESH and INVALIDATE METADATA statements when the metadata changes are performed by statements issued through Impala. When you create a table, load data, and so on through Hive, you do need to issue REFRESH or INVALIDATE METADATA on an Impala node before executing a query there.