How to Connect to Live Amazon Athena Data in Mistral AI Workflows and Agents (via CData Connect AI)

Mistral AI is a frontier AI company that builds enterprise-grade open-source and commercial large language models (LLMs). With Mistral, you can train, fine-tune, and deploy agents anywhere – on premises, in the cloud, or at the edge – while retaining full control of your data. Its agent-ready platform enables multilingual and multimodal AI that can search, create, code, automate, and collaborate securely, with support for memory and extended context handling.

CData Connect AI provides a secure cloud-to-cloud interface for easily integrating 350+ enterprise data sources with Mistral AI. Through CData Connect AI, Mistral AI agents can query, analyze, and act on live Amazon Athena data in real time, without replication. Connect AI manages authentication, security, and query optimization so you can focus on building intelligent workflows, while Mistral handles reasoning and natural language interaction.

In this guide, we will use Mistral AI's Le Chat, Mistral's customizable conversational chatbot, along with CData Connect AI to connect to live Amazon Athena data. You will be able to interact with your live Amazon Athena data directly in Mistral AI workflows – running queries and automating tasks securely.

The setup takes just a few minutes, and once connected, you will have your own chatbot agent intelligently conversing with your live Amazon Athena data.

Let's begin.

Prerequisites

1. A Mistral AI account – Sign up or log in here.
2. A CData Connect AI account – Sign up or log in here.
3. An active Amazon Athena account with valid credentials.

Overview

Here is a quick overview of the steps we will follow:

1. Connect: Add a connection to Amazon Athena in CData Connect AI using your credentials.
2. Configure: Create a custom MCP connection in Mistral AI Le Chat that points to your Amazon Athena connection in CData Connect AI.
3. Query: Interact with live Amazon Athena data in Mistral AI workflows – running queries and taking actions using natural language.

Getting Started

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Step 1: Configure Amazon Athena Connectivity for Mistral

Connectivity to Amazon Athena from Mistral AI is made possible through CData Connect AI Remote MCP. To interact with Amazon Athena data from Mistral, we start by creating and configuring a Amazon Athena connection in CData Connect AI.

1. Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection.

2. Select "Amazon Athena" from the Add Connection panel.

3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Amazon Athena.

   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.

   
4. Click Save & Test.
5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add Amazon Athena Connection page and update the user-based permissions.

Add a Personal Access Token

A Personal Access Token (PAT) is used to authenticate the connection to Connect AI from Mistral AI. It is a best practice to create a separate PAT for each service to maintain fine-grained access control.

1. Click on the gear icon () at the top right of the Connect AI app to open the Settings page.
2. On the Settings page, go to the Access Tokens section and click Create PAT.
3. Give the PAT a descriptive name and click Create.
4. Note: The PAT is only visible at creation, so be sure to copy and store it securely for future use.

With the connection configured and a PAT generated, you are ready to connect to Amazon Athena data from Mistral AI workflows.

Step 2: Configure the MCP Connector in Mistral Le Chat

With your Amazon Athena connection and PAT created in CData Connect AI, the next step is to configure a custom MCP connector inside Mistral Le Chat.

1. Log into Le Chat.
2. From the left-hand menu, click on Intelligence, then select Connectors. Click Add Connector.
3. In the dialog, select Custom MCP Connector and enter the following details:
   • Connector Name: For example, CData_Remote_MCP.
   • Connector Server: https://mcp.cloud.cdata.com/mcp (found in the "Connect Data to AI" ribbon in Connect AI).
   • Authentication Method: API Token Authentication.
   • Header Name: Authorization.
   • Header Value: Basic [email protected]:YourPAT (replace "[email protected]" with your CData Connect AI email and "YourPAT" with the PAT created earlier in above format).
   
4. Click Connect to establish the connection.
5. Scroll down to the bottom of the Connections section to confirm that your MCP connection is successfully established.

This step ensures that Mistral Le Chat can securely route queries through the CData Remote MCP Server to your live Amazon Athena data.

Step 3: Query Live Amazon Athena Data from Mistral AI

Now that your MCP connector is configured in Le Chat, you can begin querying live Amazon Athena data directly in your conversations.

1. In Le Chat, click on Chats in the left menu to start a new chat.
2. Enable your MCP connector by clicking the Enable Tools button.
3. Run a discovery query such as Get Catalogs or Get Tables to see the available data sources and schemas connected through CData Connect AI.
4. Test the connection by running a simple query. For example: "Compare the win rate of Opportunities across different industries."

And that's it! You can now interact with live Amazon Athena data conversationally inside Mistral Le Chat.

Build Complex AI Agents with CData Connect AI

With the integration complete, you can go beyond simple queries and build complex, multi-step AI agents. These agents can combine reasoning from Mistral AI with secure, real-time access to your enterprise data through CData Connect AI, enabling workflows such as sales forecasting, support triage, customer trend analysis, and more.

Try CData Connect AI for free today and use the full power of Mistral AI agents with secure, live access to your enterprise data.