New Features in Impala 2.10 for MapR

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

Impala 2.10.0 for MapR introduces some new features that enhance the behavior and performance of Impala.

Functions

The following sections provide information about new and improved Impala functions:

String function, replace()

Faster than regexp_replace() for simple string substitutions.

Description: replace(string initial, string target, string replacement)

Purpose: Returns the initial argument with all occurrences of the target string replaced by the replacement string.

Return type: string

Usage notes: Because this function does not use any regular expression patterns, it is typically faster than regexp_replace() for simple string substitutions. If any argument is NULL, the return value is NULL. The matching is case-sensitive. If the replacement string contains another instance of the target string, the expansion is only performed once, instead of applying it again to the newly constructed string.

Example:
[localhost:21000] > select replace('hello world','world','earth');
Query: select replace('hello world','world','earth')
Query submitted at: 2018-02-08 05:10:11 (Coordinator: http://localhost.lab:25000)
Query progress can be monitored at: http://localhost:25000/query_plan?query_id=5e4686bd9b870724:f281e86f00000000
+------------------------------------------+
| replace('hello world', 'world', 'earth') |
+------------------------------------------+
| hello earth |
+------------------------------------------+
Fetched 1 row(s) in 0.02s              

Date/time function, last_day()

For finding the date corresponding to the last day of a particular month.

Description:last_day(timestamp t)

Purpose: timestamp

Usage notes: If the input argument does not represent a valid Impala TIMESTAMP including both date and time portions, the function returns NULL. For example, if the input argument is a string that cannot be implicitly cast to TIMESTAMP, does not include a date portion, or is out of the allowed range for Impala TIMESTAMP values, the function returns NULL.

Example:
[localhost:21000] > select
> now() as right_now
> , dayofmonth(now()) as day
> , extract(day from now()) as also_day
> , dayofmonth(last_day(now())) as last_day
> , extract(day from last_day(now())) as also_last_day;
Query: select now() as right_now
, dayofmonth(now()) as day
, extract(day from now()) as also_day
, dayofmonth(last_day(now())) as last_day
, extract(day from last_day(now())) as also_last_day
Query submitted at: 2018-02-08 05:07:59 (Coordinator: http://localhost:25000)
Query progress can be monitored at: http://localhost:25000/query_plan?query_id=5147af5bc88d7632:1e42f5c100000000
+-------------------------------+-----+----------+----------+---------------+
| right_now | day | also_day | last_day | also_last_day |
+-------------------------------+-----+----------+----------+---------------+
| 2018-02-08 05:07:59.999909000 | 8 | 8 | 28 | 28 |
+-------------------------------+-----+----------+----------+---------------+ 

Date/time function, last_day()

Provides a simple way to get a stable, interoperable representation of a TIMESTAMP value without using a chain of functions to convert between representations and apply a specific timezone.

Other Features

Impala Query History

You can re-execute previously queries via @query_number(from start) or @-query_number(from end):
[localhost:21000] >@1;
Rerunning invalidate metadata;
Query: invalidate metadata
[localhost:21000] > @-1;
Rerunning show tables in default;
Query: show tables in default

Drop partitions via special symbols (<, >, <>, !=, <=, >=)

ALTER TABLE query for DROP partition can use special symbols for drop range of the partitions:
ALTER TABLE db.table DROP PARTITION (partition<=partition_value);

CREATE TABLE with SORT BY

Introduced SORT BY clause in the CREATE TABLE statement:
CREATE TABLE sorted_tbl (id int, name char(22), age int) SORT BY (age);

TRUNK() can now apply to numeric types (FLOAT, DOUBLE, and DECIMAL) in addition to TIMESTAMP

Although this functionality was already available through the truncate() function, the new signatures for trunc() make it easier to port code from other popular database systems to Impala.

Support ENUM type for parquet tables

The CREATE TABLE LIKE PARQUET statement can now handle Parquet files produced outside of Impala and containing ENUM types. The ENUM columns become STRING columns in the target table, and the ENUM values are turned into corresponding STRING values.