Documentation

This is a page to record current status, plans, and work items related to the Impala documentation in the context of the Apache incubation process. All subject to change based on guidance from the Apache mentors and the Impala community - for the moment the content here is mainly "thinking out loud" on the part of John, who has been sole author of the Impala docs up to now.

Historically, the Impala documentation has lived on the Cloudera web site; however, the entire rendered Impala documentation set is now available on the Documentation tab of the Apache Impala (incubating) web site. The rendered documentation is available in HTML and PDF. These links include all of the currently available Impala documentation: the release notes, SQL reference, installation, administration, and development guides.

Authoring Logistics

Source of the main Impala documentation (SQL Reference and such) is in XML, using the DITA XML format and buildable by an open source toolchain.

Version control has been done by git for some time now, so source files should slot nicely into git in the Apache project and the authoring workflow should stay mostly the same.

The Impala-related docs are relatively self-contained. They have few if any direct xrefs to non-Impala topics that would cause build breakage when built outside the CDH library; any such references are typically http:// links that can be conditionalized out or removed for Apache purposes. We kept the ability to publish a standalone Impala library even after merging the Impala docs into the big CDH library (which happened with the Impala 2.0 release, which became part of CDH 5.2).