Discover how a bimodal integration strategy can address the major data management challenges facing your organization today.
Get the Report →Design BIRT Reports on Amazon Athena Data
Provide current Amazon Athena data to your embedded analytics.
The CData JDBC Driver for Amazon Athena integrates connectivity to Amazon Athena APIs into your data-driven Java applications. You can use the CData JDBC Driver for Amazon Athena with the BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools) platform to create BIRT reports that reflect changes to your data in real time.
About Amazon Athena Data Integration
CData provides the easiest way to access and integrate live data from Amazon Athena. Customers use CData connectivity to:
- Authenticate securely using a variety of methods, including IAM credentials, access keys, and Instance Profiles, catering to diverse security needs and simplifying the authentication process.
- Streamline their setup and quickly resolve issue with detailed error messaging.
- Enhance performance and minimize strain on client resources with server-side query execution.
Users frequently integrate Athena with analytics tools like Tableau, Power BI, and Excel for in-depth analytics from their preferred tools.
To learn more about unique Amazon Athena use cases with CData, check out our blog post: https://www.cdata.com/blog/amazon-athena-use-cases.
Getting Started
- If you have not already done so, install the BIRT Framework plugin and the Database Development plugin for Eclipse.
- Click File -> New -> Report. The Report Design perspective is opened.
- In the Data Explorer, right-click Data Sources and click New Data Source.
- Select the Create from a Data Source Type in the Following List option and select JDBC Data Source.
- Click Manage Drivers and add the driver JAR, located in the lib subfolder of the installation folder.
- In the Database URL box, enter the JDBC URL containing the connection string.
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.
Built-in Connection String Designer
For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the Amazon Athena JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.
java -jar cdata.jdbc.amazonathena.jar
Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.
When you configure the JDBC URL, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.
A typical JDBC URL is below:
jdbc:amazonathena:AWSAccessKey='a123';AWSSecretKey='s123';AWSRegion='IRELAND';Database='sampledb';S3StagingDirectory='s3://bucket/staging/';
- Right-click the Data Sets folder and select the JDBC data source for Amazon Athena.
- In the resulting dialog, build the SELECT query to be used to retrieve the data for the report. This article uses the following query:
SELECT Name, TotalDue FROM Customers
- In the Palette, drag a Chart onto the editor. The chart wizard is displayed.
- After selecting the chart type, drag columns onto the chart fields on the Select Data tab.
- Click Run -> View Report -> In Web Viewer to view the report.
Your BIRT reports can now pick up any updates to Amazon Athena data.
To publish the report to your application server, add the driver JAR to the BIRT Viewer's classpath. For more information, see the CData KB for guides to deploying the JDBC Driver on Java application servers.