I am reaaaaally late on this answer!!! But since i recently faced this issue myself, i am gonna answer to help somebody else out. The solution was not to remove the sqoop keyword when passing the command tag in workflow.xml Pass the command in this way. <command>import --connect "jdbc:mysql://localhost;database=US_DB" --username root -P --table employee --hbase-table hb_emp --column-family cfemp --incremental append --check-column empid --last-value 304</command> ... View more