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The Amazon Athena ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live data from Amazon Athena, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access Amazon Athena interactive query services data like you would a database, through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

Write a Simple Go Application to work with Amazon Athena Data on Linux

Use the CData ODBC Driver for Amazon Athena and unixODBC to create a simple Go app with live connectivity to Amazon Athena data.

Go is an open source programming language that enables you to easily build software on Linux/UNIX machines. When Go is paired with the ODBC Driver for Amazon Athena and unixODBC you are able write applications with connectivity to live Amazon Athena data. This article will walk you through the process of installing the ODBC Driver for Amazon Athena, configuring a connection using the unixODBC Driver Manager, and creating a simple Go application to work with Amazon Athena data.

Using the CData ODBC Drivers on a Unix/Linux Machine

The CData ODBC Drivers are supported in various Red Hat-based and Debian-based systems, including Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora. There are also several libraries and packages that are required, many of which may be installed by default, depending on your system. For more information on the supported versions of Linux operating systems and the required libraries, please refer to the "Getting Started" section in help documentation (installed and found online).

Installing the Driver Manager

Before installing the driver, you need to be sure that your system has a driver manager. For this article, you will use unixODBC, a free and open source ODBC driver manager that is widely supported.

For Debian-based systems like Ubuntu, you can install unixODBC with the APT package manager:


$ apt-get install unixodbc unixodbc-dev

For systems based on Red Hat Linux, you can install unixODBC with yum or dnf:


$ yum install unixODBC unixODBC-devel

The unixODBC driver manager reads information about drivers from an odbcinst.ini file and about data sources from an odbc.ini file. You can determine the location of the configuration files on your system by entering the following command into a terminal:


$ odbcinst -j

The output of the command will display the locations of the configuration files for ODBC data sources and registered ODBC drivers. User data sources can only be accessed by the user account whose home folder the odbc.ini is located in. System data sources can be accessed by all users. Below is an example of the output of this command:


DRIVERS............: /etc/odbcinst.ini
SYSTEM DATA SOURCES: /etc/odbc.ini
FILE DATA SOURCES..: /etc/ODBCDataSources
USER DATA SOURCES..: /home/myuser/.odbc.ini
SQLULEN Size.......: 8
SQLLEN Size........: 8
SQLSETPOSIROW Size.: 8

Installing the Driver

You can download the driver in standard package formats: the Debian .deb package format or the .rpm file format. Once you have downloaded the file, you can install the driver from the terminal.

The driver installer registers the driver with unixODBC and creates a system DSN, which can be used later in any tools or applications that support ODBC connectivity.

For Debian-based systems like Ubuntu, run the following command with sudo or as root: $ dpkg -i /path/to/package.deb

For systems that support .rpms, run the following command with sudo or as root: $ rpm -i /path/to/package.rpm

Once the driver is installed, you can list the registered drivers and defined data sources using the unixODBC driver manager:

List the Registered Driver(s)


$ odbcinst -q -d
CData ODBC Driver for Amazon Athena
...

List the Defined Data Source(s)


$ odbcinst -q -s
CData AmazonAthena Source
...

To use the CData ODBC Driver for Amazon Athena with unixODBC, you need to ensure that the driver is configured to use UTF-16. To do so, edit the INI file for the driver (cdata.odbc.amazonathena.ini), which can be found in the lib folder in the installation location (typically /opt/cdata/cdata-odbc-driver-for-amazonathena), as follows:

cdata.odbc.amazonathena.ini


...

[Driver]
DriverManagerEncoding = UTF-16

Modifying the DSN

When the driver is installed, a system DSN should be predefined. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties. Additionally, you can create user-specific DSNs that will not require root access to modify in $HOME/.odbc.ini.

Authenticating to Amazon Athena

To authorize Amazon Athena requests, provide the credentials for an administrator account or for an IAM user with custom permissions: Set AccessKey to the access key Id. Set SecretKey to the secret access key.

Note: Though you can connect as the AWS account administrator, it is recommended to use IAM user credentials to access AWS services.

Obtaining the Access Key

To obtain the credentials for an IAM user, follow the steps below:

Sign into the IAM console.
In the navigation pane, select Users.
To create or manage the access keys for a user, select the user and then select the Security Credentials tab.

To obtain the credentials for your AWS root account, follow the steps below:

Sign into the AWS Management console with the credentials for your root account.
Select your account name or number and select My Security Credentials in the menu that is displayed.
Click Continue to Security Credentials and expand the Access Keys section to manage or create root account access keys.

Authenticating from an EC2 Instance

If you are using the CData Data Provider for Amazon Athena 2018 from an EC2 Instance and have an IAM Role assigned to the instance, you can use the IAM Role to authenticate. To do so, set UseEC2Roles to true and leave AccessKey and SecretKey empty. The CData Data Provider for Amazon Athena 2018 will automatically obtain your IAM Role credentials and authenticate with them.

Authenticating as an AWS Role

In many situations it may be preferable to use an IAM role for authentication instead of the direct security credentials of an AWS root user. An AWS role may be used instead by specifying the RoleARN. This will cause the CData Data Provider for Amazon Athena 2018 to attempt to retrieve credentials for the specified role. If you are connecting to AWS (instead of already being connected such as on an EC2 instance), you must additionally specify the AccessKey and SecretKey of an IAM user to assume the role for. Roles may not be used when specifying the AccessKey and SecretKey of an AWS root user.

Authenticating with MFA

For users and roles that require Multi-factor Authentication, specify the MFASerialNumber and MFAToken connection properties. This will cause the CData Data Provider for Amazon Athena 2018 to submit the MFA credentials in a request to retrieve temporary authentication credentials. Note that the duration of the temporary credentials may be controlled via the TemporaryTokenDuration (default 3600 seconds).

Connecting to Amazon Athena

In addition to the AccessKey and SecretKey properties, specify Database, S3StagingDirectory and Region. Set Region to the region where your Amazon Athena data is hosted. Set S3StagingDirectory to a folder in S3 where you would like to store the results of queries.

If Database is not set in the connection, the data provider connects to the default database set in Amazon Athena.

/etc/odbc.ini or $HOME/.odbc.ini


[CData AmazonAthena Source]
Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Amazon Athena
Description = My Description
AccessKey = 'a123'
SecretKey = 's123'
Region = 'IRELAND'
Database = 'sampledb'
S3StagingDirectory = 's3://bucket/staging/'

For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).

Creating a Simple Go App for Amazon Athena Data

With the Driver Manager installed and the DSN configured, you are ready to create a simple Go application to work with your Amazon Athena data. To start, install a Go driver for ODBC databases. While there are several options available, this article will use the odbc driver found at https://github.com/alexbrainman/odbc.

Installing odbc on Linux

To install the odbc driver for Go, you will need to first ensure that you define the GOPATH environment variable:


export GOPATH=$HOME/golang/go

Once GOPATH is defined, you are ready to install the Go driver for ODBC databases:


$ go get github.com/alexbrainman/odbc

Now you are ready to create and execute a simple Go application.

Sample Go Application

The sample application issues a simple SQL SELECT query for Amazon Athena data and displays the results. Create the directory $GOPATH/src/cdata-odbc-athena and create a new Go source file, copying the source code from below.

cdata-odbc-athena.go


package main

import (
  _ "github.com/alexbrainman/odbc"
  "database/sql"
  "log"
  "fmt"
)

func main() {
  db, err := sql.Open("odbc",
    "DSN=CData AmazonAthena Source")
  if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
  }

  var (
    name string
    totaldue string
  )

  rows, err := db.Query("SELECT Name, TotalDue FROM Customers WHERE CustomerId = ?", "12345")
  if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
  }
  defer rows.Close()
  for rows.Next() {
    err := rows.Scan(&name, &totaldue)
    if err != nil {
      log.Fatal(err)
    }
    fmt.Println(name, totaldue)
  }
  err = rows.Err()
  if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
  }

  defer db.Close()
}

In the terminal, navigate to the Go application directory and build the application:


$ go build

After the application builds, you will be able to execute the application, displaying your Amazon Athena data:


$ ./cdata-odbc-athena

At this point, you have a simple Go application for working with Amazon Athena data. From here, you can easily expand the application, adding deeper read/write functionality through familiar SQL queries.

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