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

Access Amazon Athena interactive query services data like you would a database, through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

Natively Connect to Amazon Athena Data in PHP

Create PHP applications on Linux/UNIX machines with connectivity to Amazon Athena data. Leverage the native support for ODBC in PHP.

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for Amazon Athena into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build Amazon Athena-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to Amazon Athena data, execute queries, and output the results.

Using the CData ODBC Drivers on a UNIX/Linux Machine

The CData ODBC Drivers are supported in various Red Hat-based and Debian-based systems, including Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora. There are also several libraries and packages that are required, many of which may be installed by default, depending on your system. For more information on the supported versions of Linux operating systems and the required libraries, please refer to the "Getting Started" section in the help documentation (installed and found online).

Installing the Driver Manager

Before installing the driver, check that your system has a driver manager. For this article, you will use unixODBC, a free and open source ODBC driver manager that is widely supported.

For Debian-based systems like Ubuntu, you can install unixODBC with the APT package manager:


$ sudo apt-get install unixodbc unixodbc-dev

For systems based on Red Hat Linux, you can install unixODBC with yum or dnf:


$ sudo yum install unixODBC unixODBC-devel

The unixODBC driver manager reads information about drivers from an odbcinst.ini file and about data sources from an odbc.ini file. You can determine the location of the configuration files on your system by entering the following command into a terminal:


$ odbcinst -j

The output of the command will display the locations of the configuration files for ODBC data sources and registered ODBC drivers. User data sources can only be accessed by the user account whose home folder the odbc.ini is located in. System data sources can be accessed by all users. Below is an example of the output of this command:


DRIVERS............: /etc/odbcinst.ini
SYSTEM DATA SOURCES: /etc/odbc.ini
FILE DATA SOURCES..: /etc/ODBCDataSources
USER DATA SOURCES..: /home/myuser/.odbc.ini
SQLULEN Size.......: 8
SQLLEN Size........: 8
SQLSETPOSIROW Size.: 8

Installing the Driver

You can download the driver in standard package formats: the Debian .deb package format or the .rpm file format. Once you have downloaded the file, you can install the driver from the terminal.

The driver installer registers the driver with unixODBC and creates a system DSN, which can be used later in any tools or applications that support ODBC connectivity.

For Debian-based systems like Ubuntu, run the following command with sudo or as root: $ dpkg -i /path/to/package.deb

For Red Hat systems or other systems that support .rpms, run the following command with sudo or as root: $ rpm -i /path/to/package.rpm

Once the driver is installed, you can list the registered drivers and defined data sources using the unixODBC driver manager:

List the Registered Driver(s)


$ odbcinst -q -d
CData ODBC Driver for Amazon Athena
...

List the Defined Data Source(s)


$ odbcinst -q -s
CData AmazonAthena Source
...

To use the CData ODBC Driver for Amazon Athena with unixODBC, ensure that the driver is configured to use UTF-16. To do so, edit the INI file for the driver (cdata.odbc.amazonathena.ini), which can be found in the lib folder in the installation location (typically /opt/cdata/cdata-odbc-driver-for-amazonathena), as follows:

cdata.odbc.amazonathena.ini


...

[Driver]
DriverManagerEncoding = UTF-16

Modifying the DSN

The driver installation predefines a system DSN. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties. Additionally, you can create user-specific DSNs that will not require root access to modify in $HOME/.odbc.ini.

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.

/etc/odbc.ini or $HOME/.odbc.ini


[CData AmazonAthena Source]
Driver = CData ODBC Driver for Amazon Athena
Description = My Description
AccessKey = 'a123'
SecretKey = 's123'
Region = 'IRELAND'
Database = 'sampledb'
S3StagingDirectory = 's3://bucket/staging/'

For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).

Establish a Connection

Open the connection to Amazon Athena by calling the odbc_connect or odbc_pconnect methods. To close connections, use odbc_close or odbc_close_all.


$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC AmazonAthena Source","user","password");

Connections opened with odbc_connect are closed when the script ends. Connections opened with the odbc_pconnect method are still open after the script ends. This enables other scripts to share that connection when they connect with the same credentials. By sharing connections among your scripts, you can save system resources and queries execute faster.


$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC AmazonAthena Source","user","password");
...
odbc_close($conn); //persistent connection must be closed explicitly

Create Prepared Statements

Create prepared statements and parameterized queries with the odbc_prepare function.


$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE CustomerId = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with odbc_execute.


$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC AmazonAthena Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE CustomerId = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('12345'));

Execute nonparameterized queries with odbc_exec.


$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC AmazonAthena Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Name, TotalDue FROM Customers");

Process Results

Access a row in the result set as an array with the odbc_fetch_array function.


$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Amazon Athena data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Name, TotalDue FROM Customers");
while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){
 echo $row["Name"] . "\n";
}

Display the result set in an HTML table with the odbc_result_all function.


$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Amazon Athena data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Customers WHERE CustomerId = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array('12345'));
if($success)
  odbc_result_all($query);

More Example Queries

You will find complete information on the SQL queries supported by the driver in the help documentation. The code examples above are Amazon Athena-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.

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