If you are using POJO's to write data via key / value puts and you then want to read that same data via SQL, you need to both reference your POJO's in your SQL create statement in the "with" portion of the create statement listing the fully qualified class name for the key and the fully qualified class name for the value. You will also need to be sure that your class files are distributed to the cluster and available on all cluster nodes. Hope that helps.