title: Setting date format parameter on a sqoop-import job
body: <p>I am having trouble casting a date column to a string using sqoop-import from an oracle database to an HDFS parquet file. I am using the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>sqoop-import -Doraoop.oracle.session.initialization.statements="alter session set nls_date_format='YYYYMMDD'"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My understanding is that this should execute the above statement before it begins transferring data. I have also tried</p>
  
  <pre><code>-Duser.nls_date_format="YYYYMMDD"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But this doesn't work either, the resulting parquet file still contains the original date format as listed in the table. If it matters, I am running these in a bash script and also casting the same date columns to string using <code>--map-column-java "MY_DATE_COL_NAME=String"</code>What am I doing wrong?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks very much. </p>