Tutorial Exercise 2 - Analysis Exception Syntax error

[#1]

I am in Impala running through the Quickstart tutorial. When I copy all the create table statements and click execute, I get this error and no tables are made:

AnalysisException: Syntax error in line 1: USE ^ Encountered: EOF Expected: IDENTIFIER CAUSED BY: Exception: Syntax error

Any ideas? Someone on another post suggested going into Cloudera Manager and making sure Impala and other services are running, but I can't get Cloudera Manager to load, so maybe I have bigger issues.

Other post: https://community.cloudera.com/t5/Cloudera-Live-End-to-end/invalidate-metadata-error/td-p/23827

[#2]

The previous post was about running the tutorial Cloudera Live (which is a fully-distributed cloud cluster), which uses Cloudera Manager. The QuickStart VM is intended to be much smaller, so Cloudera Manager is actually off by default. So unless you're run 'Launch Cloudera Manager' on the desktop, the fact that you can't connect to Cloudera Manager isn't a sign that anything's wrong. Also, it sounds like you might not be on the latest QuickStart VM. A more recent CDH version made it possible for Sqoop to do all the work of creating the tables for you, so this section becaomes significantly simpler.

If Impala is down, Hue should be saying so on its home page. But you can make sure all the services are up via Linux's service command, e.g:

sudo service impala-server status
sudo service impala-state-store status
sudo service impala-catalog status

If all the services are up, let's try some simpler queries to figure out what's going wrong, because I'm not sure what this error is actually meant to be telling you. Let's first see what tables already exist:

show tables;

I would also try entering the queries 1 by 1 manually. It's possible something funny is going on with the copy / paste button and introducing some invalid characters or something. If you can reproduce this error with single queries, that also helps narrow down where the problem may be.

[#3 · Accepted solution]

I would think I'm on the latest VM, I mean I just downloaded it last week. But I did get this to work but removing the vm and then reloading it but changing it to use 8 gb of RAM instead of 4 and 2 CPUs. This was suggested if you needed to run Cloudera Manager, which like you said, is not turned on by default. But oddly, I did not do anything to turn on Cloudera Manager... I'm still learning a lot.

[#4]

Hi,

I am also in Impala and doing the same exercise (2) creating tables. I got the same error (Analysis Exception.....Syntax error).

I increased the VM RAM to 8GB (with 2 CPUs) but I still get the errors.

In Hue everything is ok, no config issues. But when I ran 'sudo service impala-server status'  in the terminal, the impala server is not running. Did the same for impala-state-store and impala-catalog. They are not running as well.

Any idea/solution/help would be appreciated.

I'm newbie to Hadoop and just started learning.

Thanks,

Edward

[#5]

If all 3 Impala services are down it's probably ultimately because of HDFS. Check the 'hadoop-hdfs-namenode' and 'hadoop-hdfs-datanode' services too - they may just need to be restarted, and then you can try starting the Impala services. If it's some transient error (most likely) a reboot may resolve all of it.

If you continue having issues, check out the logs in /var/log/impala (and /var/log/hadoop-hdfs) for any errors that may a clue.

[#6]

Sorry for the late reply.

I reinstalled the Quickstart VM (created a new VM) and all exercises worked just fine :). I guess I touched/tweaked some settings in Cloudera Manager that caused some hadoop services to fail or stopped running. Too eager/curious/excited with Cloudera Hadoop environment :)).

[#7]

It looks like for each exercie new cloudera-quick-start has to be imported to VM. Otherwise if you think too much about a given problem services shut down. And this is sometimes not visible via UI, sometimes they turn black, sometimes the servuces are grey but in command line their status is 'FAILED'.

With all issues tutorial takes forever 😞