SQOOP Server configuration files are stored in server/config directory of distributed artifact along side with other configuration files of Tomcat (to host SQOOP server).
File sqoop_bootstrap.properties specifies which configuration provider should be used for loading configuration for rest of Sqoop server. Default value PropertiesConfigurationProvider should be sufficient.
Second configuration file sqoop.properties contains remaining configuration properties that can affect Sqoop server. File is very well documented, so check if all configuration properties fits your environment. Default or very little tweaking should be sufficient most common cases.
Sqoop is a Hadoop Command Line tool that imports table from an RDBMS data source to HDFS and vice versa. It generates a Java class which allows us to interact with the imported data. Each row from a table is saved as a separate record in HDFS. Records can be stored as text files or in binary representation as Avro or Sequence Files. There are 2 versions of sqoop :
Sqoop1 and Sqoop2
Sqoop1 is the widely accepted tool and is recommended for production environments. Find the comparison between Sqoop1 and Sqoop2 as stated on Cloudera's website.
Sqoop incremental import comes into picture because of a phenomenon called CDC i.e. Change Data Capture. Now what is CDC?
CDC is a design pattern that captures individual data changes instead of dealing with the entire data. Instead of dumping our entire database, using CDC, we could capture just the data changes made to the master database.
For example : If we are dealing with a data problem, say, 1 lakh data entries coming into the RDBMS daily and we have to get this data in Hadoop on a daily basis then we would want to just get the newly added data, as importing the complete RDBMS data daily to Hadoop will be an overhead and delays the availability of data also. For a detailed explanation go through this link.