I am setting greenplum for the first time. I am following the documentation. I want to setup connection from sql to greenplum database. Currently figuring out what's the best way to achieve this. I came across gpfdist and gpload.
How are the two different? Since both use external tables, both work on slaved nodes and are used for parallel loading. So Is there any advantage of using one over other?
Answering to your question for " I want to setup connection from sql to greenplum database"... It's ambiguous for which SQL database you are referring to.
Also, there is no direct connectivity drivers available to connect non-greenplum database to greenplum database.
However if you want to migrate data from Oracle to Greenplum, then you can use Informatica's fastclone tool.
To answer your second part of question regarding gpfdist and gpload. GPFDIST is a file distributed process which runs on host system and it serves file parallely to many segments. While initialising external table to read/ write from file, you will need to specify which process will serve the file, In your case it will be GPFDIST. There are other processes too like FTP, GPHDFS, HTTP.
GPLOAD is a wrapper utility which makes your work easier by automatically creating gpfdist processes and external tables.
Also be aware that GPLOAD can only create readable external tables.