Connect to Airtable Data in Aqua Data Studio

The CData JDBC Driver for Airtable integrates Airtable data with wizards and analytics in IDEs like Aqua Data Studio. This article shows how to connect to Airtable data through the connection manager and execute queries.

Create a JDBC Data Source

You can use the connection manager to define connection properties and save them in a new JDBC data source. The Airtable data source can then be accessed from Aqua Data Studio tools.

1. In Aqua Data Studio, select Register Server from the Servers menu.
2. In the Register Server form, select the 'Generic - JDBC' connection.
3. Enter the following JDBC connection properties:
   • Name: Enter a name for the data source; for example, Airtable.
   • Driver Location: Click the Browse button and select the cdata.jdbc.airtable.jar file, located in the lib subfolder of the installation directory.
   • Driver: Enter the Driver's class name, cdata.jdbc.airtable.AirtableDriver.

   • URL: Enter the JDBC URL, which starts with jdbc:airtable: and is followed by a semicolon-separated list of connection properties.

     APIKey, BaseId and TableNames parameters are required to connect to Airtable. ViewNames is an optional parameter where views of the tables may be specified.

     • APIKey : API Key of your account. To obtain this value, after logging in go to Account. In API section click Generate API key.
     • BaseId : Id of your base. To obtain this value, it is in the same section as the APIKey. Click on Airtable API, or navigate to https://airtable.com/api and select a base. In the introduction section you can find "The ID of this base is appxxN2ftedc0nEG7."
     • TableNames : A comma separated list of table names for the selected base. These are the same names of tables as found in the UI.
     • ViewNames : A comma separated list of views in the format of (table.view) names. These are the same names of the views as found in the UI.

     Built-in Connection String Designer

     For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the Airtable JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.

     java -jar cdata.jdbc.airtable.jar

     Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

     A typical JDBC URL is below:
     jdbc:airtable:APIKey=keymz3adb53RqsU;BaseId=appxxN2fe34r3rjdG7;TableNames=Table1,...;ViewNames=Table1.View1,...;

Query Airtable Data

You can now query the tables exposed.