Cloudera hosted the Apache Sqoop Meetup last week at Cloudera HQ in Palo Alto. About 20 of the Meetup attendees had not used Sqoop before, but were interested enough to participate in the Meetup on April 4th. We believe this healthy interest in Sqoop will contribute to its wide adoption.

Not only was this Sqoop's second Meetup but also a celebration for Sqoop's graduation from the Incubator, cementing its status as a Top-Level Project in the Apache Software Foundation.

Sqoop's come a long way since its beginnings three years ago as a contrib module for Apache Hadoop submitted by Aaron Kimball. As a result, it was fitting that Aaron gave the first talk of the night by discussing its history: "Sqoop: The Early Days." From Aaron, we learned that Sqoop’s original name was "SQLImport" and that it was conceived out of his frustration from the inability to easily query both unstructured and structured data at the same time.

Closing out the evening, Arvind Prabhakar described the "Highlights of Sqoop 2.” Sqoop 2 will enable users to use Sqoop effectively with a minimal understanding of its details. For instance, by having a web-application run Sqoop, Sqoop can be installed once and used from anywhere. Among other goals for the project are ease of the development of connectors and security enhancements.

With the conclusion of the scheduled talks, the graduation cake was cut, the swag was passed out, and the hallway talks commenced on the anticipated features of Sqoop 2. We encourage you to participate in and contribute to Sqoop 2's Design and Implementation.