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Differences between Sqoop and Flume

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Sqoop and Flume are coming from the Hadoop Ecosystem. The best part about Sqoop and Flume is that they can ingest Data using Configuration (rather than coding). Sqoop is based on MR/Spark architecture and Flume has its own Agent based architecture. In this article, we will compare Sqoop vs Flume w.r.t. various features. So, Let’s understand the comparisons in detail –

Sqoop
Flume
Sqoop is specifically used for batch data ingestion
Flume is for streaming (flowing) data ingestion
Sqoop is used for RDBMS, NoSQL databases such as HBase etc. It is also used for mainframe DB2
Flume is basically used for Log file, Twitter data ingestion and it is one way
It is Bidirectional because we can import as well as export data
Flume is unidirectional. We cannot send data back to Twitter or log files
Sqoop is based on Map-Reduce architecture. Internally, Sqoop will run MR jobs. Sqoop can also run on Spark but that project is not so common in production. If you go to Github you will find a lot of initiatives were going on related to Sqoop on Spark but you will find Sqoop on Map Reduce is very common
Flume is not based on Map Reduce Architecture. It has its own Agent based architecture, also called JVMs. Agent has 3 components- 1. Source which connects to origin of data or another Agent 2. Channel – Propagation path of data 3. Sink which connects to destination of data or another Agent
Sqoop commands are triggered on demand, you can Schedule it through different workflow schedulers like Oozie, Airflow etc.
Flume is always running because it is for streaming data ingestion. So it’s basically always on, always listening for data and then bringing data into HDFS


Now, Flume is not a very popular project because Kafka has come. It is no longer a priority for Cloudera and many big companies. Initially Flume became very popular from 2011-2017. Till 2017- 2018 also seen projects implementing sqoop. But Now a days, if you are going for a new implementation, you will prefer some other technology not specifically Flume. But Sqoop is still popular in lots of projects.

So, I hope you are able to distinguish between Sqoop and Flume in the Big Data Ecosystem.

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