Impala Limitations

IMPORTANT This component is deprecated. Hewlett Packard Enterprise recommends using an alternate product. For more information, see Discontinued Ecosystem Components.

What Impala Does Not Provide

Impala does not replace Hive or other frameworks built on MapReduce for long-running batch-oriented queries.

Impala is not fit as a query layer to support operational/OLTP applications (No update/deletes, not optimized for point look-ups).

Known Limitations in Impala

Impala has the following known limitations:

  • The LOAD DATA statement does not work when the source directory and destination table are in different encryption zones.
  • The Impala configuration option, --disk_spill_encryption, is not supported to secure sensitive data from being observed or tampered with when temporarily stored on disk.
  • Redaction of sensitive data from Impala log files is not supported.
  • You cannot use the lineage information feature to track who has accessed data through Impala SQL statements.

Impala UDFs (user-defined functions) have the following known limitations:

  • Impala does not work with UDFs that accept or return composite, nested, or types not available in Impala tables.
  • UDFs must produce the same output each time the same argument value is passed.
  • UDFs cannot spawn other threads or processes.
  • Prior to Impala 2.5.0, UDFs become undefined when you restart the catalog service. You must reload the UDFs.
  • You currently cannot include user-defined table functions in Impala queries.