Integrate Amazon Athena Data in the Pentaho Report Designer

The CData JDBC Driver for Amazon Athena data enables access to live data from dashboards and reports. This article shows how to connect to Amazon Athena data as a JDBC data source and publish reports based on Amazon Athena data in Pentaho.

Connect and Create a Report

1. Copy the JAR file of the driver, located in the lib subfolder of the installation directory, to the \Report-Designer\lib\jdbc\ folder in the Pentaho directory.
2. Run the report-designer.bat file in the \Report-Designer\ folder to open the Report-Designer UI.

3. Create a new data source with the driver by clicking Data -> Add Data Source -> Advanced -> JDBC (Custom) and then creating a new Amazon Athena connection. In the resulting dialog, configure the connection properties as shown below.

   • Custom Connection URL property: Enter the JDBC URL. This starts with jdbc:amazonathena: and is followed by a semicolon-separated list of connection properties.

     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.

     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.

     Below is a typical JDBC URL:

     jdbc:amazonathena:AccessKey='a123';SecretKey='s123';Region='IRELAND';Database='sampledb';S3StagingDirectory='s3://bucket/staging/';
   • Custom Driver Class Name: Enter cdata.jdbc.amazonathena.AmazonAthenaDriver.
   • User Name: The username to authenticate with.
   • Password: The password to authenticate with.

Add Amazon Athena Data to a Report

You are now ready to create a report with Amazon Athena data.

1. Add the Amazon Athena source to your report: Click Data -> Add Data Source -> JDBC and select the data source.

2. Configure the query. This article uses the one below:

   SELECT Name, TotalDue FROM Customers
3. Drag a chart onto your report and double-click it to edit the chart. Run the report to display the chart. You can use the results of this query to create a simple chart for the Customers table.
4. Finally, run the report to see the chart.