How to integrate Gmail with Apache Airflow

Apache Airflow supports the creation, scheduling, and monitoring of data engineering workflows. When paired with the CData JDBC Driver for Gmail, Airflow can work with live Gmail data. This article describes how to connect to and query Gmail data from an Apache Airflow instance and store the results in a CSV file.

With built-in optimized data processing, the CData JDBC Driver offers unmatched performance for interacting with live Gmail data. When you issue complex SQL queries to Gmail, the driver pushes supported SQL operations, like filters and aggregations, directly to Gmail and utilizes the embedded SQL engine to process unsupported operations client-side (often SQL functions and JOIN operations). Its built-in dynamic metadata querying allows you to work with and analyze Gmail data using native data types.

Configuring the Connection to Gmail

Built-in Connection String Designer

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

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

There are two ways to authenticate to Gmail. Before selecting one, first ensure that you have enabled IMAP access in your Gmail account settings. See the "Connecting to Gmail" section under "Getting Started" in the installed documentation for a guide.

The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, can be set to valid Gmail user credentials.

Alternatively, instead of providing the Password, you can use the OAuth authentication standard. To access Google APIs on behalf on individual users, you can use the embedded credentials or you can register your own OAuth app.

OAuth also enables you to use a service account to connect on behalf of users in a Google Apps domain. To authenticate with a service account, you will need to register an application to obtain the OAuth JWT values.

In addition to the OAuth values, you will need to provide the User. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

To host the JDBC driver in clustered environments or in the cloud, you will need a license (full or trial) and a Runtime Key (RTK). For more information on obtaining this license (or a trial), contact our sales team.

The following are essential properties needed for our JDBC connection.

Establishing a JDBC Connection within Airflow

1. Log into your Apache Airflow instance.
2. On the navbar of your Airflow instance, hover over Admin and then click Connections.
3. Next, click the + sign on the following screen to create a new connection.
4. In the Add Connection form, fill out the required connection properties:
   • Connection Id: Name the connection, i.e.: gmail_jdbc
   • Connection Type: JDBC Connection
   • Connection URL: The JDBC connection URL from above, i.e.: jdbc:gmail:RTK=5246...;User=username;Password=password;)
   • Driver Class: cdata.jdbc.gmail.GmailDriver
   • Driver Path: PATH/TO/cdata.jdbc.gmail.jar
5. Test your new connection by clicking the Test button at the bottom of the form.
6. After saving the new connection, on a new screen, you should see a green banner saying that a new row was added to the list of connections:

Creating a DAG

A DAG in Airflow is an entity that stores the processes for a workflow and can be triggered to run this workflow. Our workflow is to simply run a SQL query against Gmail data and store the results in a CSV file.

1. To get started, in the Home directory, there should be an "airflow" folder. Within there, we can create a new directory and title it "dags". In here, we store Python files that convert into Airflow DAGs shown on the UI.
2. Next, create a new Python file and title it gmail_hook.py. Insert the following code inside of this new file:

   	import time
   	from datetime import datetime
   	from airflow.decorators import dag, task
   	from airflow.providers.jdbc.hooks.jdbc import JdbcHook
   	import pandas as pd
   
   	# Declare Dag
   	@dag(dag_id="gmail_hook", schedule_interval="0 10 * * *", start_date=datetime(2022,2,15), catchup=False, tags=['load_csv'])
   	
   	# Define Dag Function
   	def extract_and_load():
   	# Define tasks
   		@task()
   		def jdbc_extract():
   			try:
   				hook = JdbcHook(jdbc_conn_id="jdbc")
   				sql = """ select * from Account """
   				df = hook.get_pandas_df(sql)
   				df.to_csv("/{some_file_path}/{name_of_csv}.csv",header=False, index=False, quoting=1)
   				# print(df.head())
   				print(df)
   				tbl_dict = df.to_dict('dict')
   				return tbl_dict
   			except Exception as e:
   				print("Data extract error: " + str(e))
               
   		jdbc_extract()
       
   	sf_extract_and_load = extract_and_load()
   

3. Save this file and refresh your Airflow instance. Within the list of DAGs, you should see a new DAG titled "gmail_hook".
4. Click on this DAG and, on the new screen, click on the unpause switch to make it turn blue, and then click the trigger (i.e. play) button to run the DAG. This executes the SQL query in our gmail_hook.py file and export the results as a CSV to whichever file path we designated in our code.
5. After triggering our new DAG, we check the Downloads folder (or wherever you chose within your Python script), and see that the CSV file has been created - in this case, account.csv.
6. Open the CSV file to see that your Gmail data is now available for use in CSV format thanks to Apache Airflow.

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