This appears to be a regression caused by the fix in SQOOP-1400. Instead of fetching results from MySQL row-by-row, sqoop is instead attempting to load the entire result set in memory.   We worked around it by upgrading to MySQL/J Connector 5.1.33 (which you're already on), and then including "--fetch-size -2147483648" in our sqoop command line options list. This restores the old row-by-row behaviour (the weird fetch size is a sentinel value recognised by the MySQL JDBC driver.) ... View more