Pipe Amazon Athena Data to CSV in PowerShell

The CData Cmdlets Module for Amazon Athena is a standard PowerShell module offering straightforward integration with Amazon Athena. Below, you will find examples of using our AmazonAthena Cmdlets with native PowerShell cmdlets.

Creating a Connection to Your Amazon Athena Data

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:

1. Sign into the IAM console.
2. In the navigation pane, select Users.
3. 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:

1. Sign into the AWS Management console with the credentials for your root account.
2. Select your account name or number and select My Security Credentials in the menu that is displayed.
3. 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.

$conn = Connect-AmazonAthena  -AccessKey "$AccessKey" -SecretKey "$SecretKey" -Region "$Region" -Database "$Database" -S3StagingDirectory "$S3StagingDirectory"

Selecting Data

Follow the steps below to retrieve data from the Customers table and pipe the result into to a CSV file:

Select-AmazonAthena -Connection $conn -Table Customers | Select -Property * -ExcludeProperty Connection,Table,Columns | Export-Csv -Path c:\myCustomersData.csv -NoTypeInformation

You will notice that we piped the results from Select-AmazonAthena into a Select-Object cmdlet and excluded some properties before piping them into an Export-Csv cmdlet. We do this because the CData Cmdlets append Connection, Table, and Columns information onto each "row" in the result set, and we do not necessarily want that information in our CSV file.

Deleting Data

The following line deletes any records that match the criteria:

Select-AmazonAthena -Connection $conn -Table Customers -Where "CustomerId = 12345" | Remove-AmazonAthena

Inserting and Updating Data

The cmdlets make data transformation easy as well as data cleansing. The following example loads data from a CSV file into Amazon Athena, checking first whether a record already exists and needs to be updated instead of inserted.

Import-Csv -Path C:\MyCustomersUpdates.csv | %{
  $record = Select-AmazonAthena -Connection $AmazonAthena -Table Customers -Where ("Id = `'"+$_.Id+"`'")
  if($record){
    Update-AmazonAthena -Connection $amazonathena -Table Customers -Columns ("Name","TotalDue") -Values ($_.Name, $_.TotalDue) -Where ("Id = `'"+$_.Id+"`'")
  }else{
    Add-AmazonAthena -Connection $amazonathena -Table Customers -Columns ("Name","TotalDue") -Values ($_.Name, $_.TotalDue)
  }
}

As always, our goal is to simplify the way you connect to data. With cmdlets users can install a data module, set the connection properties, and start building. Download Cmdlets and start working with your data in PowerShell today!