Hello!

We are still getting familiar with CDSW. One thing I'm wondering is if someone knows any reasons why the Cloudera ODBC drivers are not immediately included in the base image?

We currently run our data science jobs on a linux edge node. Although Spark is useful, we still do a lot of data preparation in both R and Python with Impala (using ODBC - respectively the odbc and turbodbc packages).

I was hoping that the Impala ODBC driver would have been included in the base image. It does not look like that is the case. Unfortunately I also found out that you cannot install OS packages directly (no root access). Only option is to change/improve the base image and build a custom image.

Customized images is certainly useful, but it requires admin intervention. It feels a bit strange that is needed to deploy Cloudera software.

Similarly, the documentation states that it "currently" does not support customization of system packages that require root access. I am wondering if there is already a roadmap here and how allowing data scientists to install OS packages would work.

Thanks!