How to create Adobe Experience Manager federated tables in MySQL

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Use the SQL Gateway and the ODBC Driver to set up federated tables for Adobe Experience Manager data in MySQL .

You can use the SQL Gateway to configure a MySQL remoting service and set up federated tables for Adobe Experience Manager data. The service is a daemon process that provides a MySQL interface to the CData ODBC Driver for Adobe Experience Manager: After you have started the service, you can create a server and tables using the FEDERATED Storage Engine in MySQL. You can then work with Adobe Experience Manager data just as you would local MySQL tables.

Connect to Adobe Experience Manager Data

If you have not already done so, provide values for the required connection properties in the data source name (DSN). You can use the built-in Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to configure the DSN. This is also the last step of the driver installation. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure a DSN.

The driver connects to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) instances that expose the JCR repository over WebDAV. It supports both on-premises AEM and AEM as a Cloud Service deployments.

To establish a connection, set the following properties:

  • URL: The WebDAV-enabled JCR server URL.
    • AEM as a Cloud Service: https://author-pXXXXX-eXXXXX.adobeaemcloud.com/crx/server
    • Local development: http://localhost:4502/crx/server
  • User: Your AEM username.
  • Password: Your AEM password.

Note: Tables are dynamically generated based on the JCR repository structure. Ensure that the configured user has sufficient permissions to access the required content paths in the AEM repository.

Configure the SQL Gateway

See the SQL Gateway Overview to set up connectivity to Adobe Experience Manager data as a virtual MySQL database. You will configure a MySQL remoting service that listens for MySQL requests from clients. The service can be configured in the SQL Gateway UI.

Creating a MySQL Remoting Service in SQL Gateway (Salesforce is shown)

Create a FEDERATED Server and Tables for Adobe Experience Manager Data

After you have configured and started the service, create a FEDERATED server to simplify the process of creating FEDERATED tables:

Create a FEDERATED Server

The following statement will create a FEDERATED server based on the ODBC Driver for Adobe Experience Manager. Note that the username and password of the FEDERATED server must match a user account you defined on the Users tab of the SQL Gateway.

CREATE SERVER fedAdobeExperienceManager
FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER mysql
OPTIONS (USER 'sql_gateway_user', PASSWORD 'sql_gateway_passwd', HOST 'sql_gateway_host', PORT ####, DATABASE 'CData AdobeExperienceManager Sys');

Create a FEDERATED Table

To create a FEDERATED table using our newly created server, use the CONNECTION keyword and pass the name of the FEDERATED server and the remote table (Content). Refer to the following template for the statement to create a FEDERATED table:

CREATE TABLE fed_content (
  ...,
  id  TYPE(LEN),
  name  TYPE(LEN),
  ...,
)
ENGINE=FEDERATED
DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
CONNECTION='fedAdobeExperienceManager/content';

NOTE: The table schema for the FEDERATED table must match the remote table schema exactly. You can always connect directly to the MySQL remoting service using any MySQL client and run a SHOW CREATE TABLE query to get the table schema.

Execute Queries

You can now execute queries to the Adobe Experience Manager FEDERATED tables from any tool that can connect to MySQL, which is particularly useful if you need to JOIN data from a local table with data from Adobe Experience Manager. Refer to the following example:

SELECT 
  fed_content.id, 
  local_table.custom_field 
FROM 
  local_table 
JOIN 
  fed_content 
ON 
  local_table.foreign_id = fed_content.id;

Ready to get started?

Download a free trial of the Adobe Experience Manager ODBC Driver to get started:

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

Access Adobe Experience Manager data like you would a database - read, write, and update Adobe Experience Manager 0, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.