In Sqoop User Guide (v1.4.1-incubating), it says 'you may also specify the --update-mode argument with allowinsert mode if you want to update rows if they exist in the database already or insert rows if they do not exist yet'.
However, I have some questions: 1: How to determine if a row is existing or not? By a specific column or key? (Actually I failed to execute a command with --update-mode argument and --update-key argument together) 2: If I did not specific a column to identify the row, I do not think the following result I got is as expected, because I want to update the first row, but sqoop insert a similar row into my table. Any idea? +------+-------------+-------+-------------+---------+----------------------+ | id | widget_name | price | design_date | version | design_comment | +------+-------------+-------+-------------+---------+----------------------+ | 1 | sprocket | 0.25 | 2010-02-10 | 3 | Connects two gizmos | | 1 | sprocket | 0.25 | 2010-02-10 | 1 | Connects two gizmos | | 2 | gizmo | 4.00 | 2009-11-30 | 4 | NULL | | 3 | gadget | 99.99 | 1983-08-29 | 13 | Our flagship product | +------+-------------+-------+-------------+---------+----------------------+
