The patch to create Hive external tables from Sqoop is still unresolved: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SQOOP-816 Unfortunately you will not be able to pull updates from source tables using only id column. You will need a timestamped (last modified) column for Sqoop to know which rows were updated. So the best practice is rather at your database side where it is always best to keep columns like 'modified', 'modified by' in your tables. https://sqoop.apache.org/docs/1.4.2/SqoopUserGuide.html#_incremental_imports ... View more