How to Build an ETL App for Autopilot Data in Python with CData

The rich ecosystem of Python modules lets you get to work quickly and integrate your systems more effectively. With the CData API Driver for Python and the petl framework, you can build Autopilot-connected applications and pipelines for extracting, transforming, and loading Autopilot data. This article shows how to connect to Autopilot with the CData Python Connector and use petl and pandas to extract, transform, and load Autopilot data.

With built-in, optimized data processing, the CData Python Connector offers unmatched performance for interacting with live Autopilot data in Python. When you issue complex SQL queries from Autopilot, the driver pushes supported SQL operations, like filters and aggregations, directly to Autopilot and utilizes the embedded SQL engine to process unsupported operations client-side (often SQL functions and JOIN operations).

Connecting to Autopilot Data

Connecting to Autopilot data looks just like connecting to any relational data source. Create a connection string using the required connection properties. For this article, you will pass the connection string as a parameter to the create_engine function.

Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the Autopilot Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Autopilot.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Autopilot (see below).

Autopilot API Profile Settings

Locate your Autopilot API key by navigating to My Account > Autopilot API > Generate and copying the generated key.

After installing the CData Autopilot Connector, follow the procedure below to install the other required modules and start accessing Autopilot through Python objects.

Install Required Modules

Use the pip utility to install the required modules and frameworks:

pip install petl
pip install pandas

Build an ETL App for Autopilot Data in Python

Once the required modules and frameworks are installed, we are ready to build our ETL app. Code snippets follow, but the full source code is available at the end of the article.

First, be sure to import the modules (including the CData Connector) with the following:

import petl as etl
import pandas as pd
import cdata.api as mod

You can now connect with a connection string. Use the connect function for the CData Autopilot Connector to create a connection for working with Autopilot data.

cnxn = mod.connect("Profile=C:\profiles\Autopilot.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key';")

Create a SQL Statement to Query Autopilot

Use SQL to create a statement for querying Autopilot. In this article, we read data from the Account entity.

sql = "SELECT At, BusinessName FROM Account WHERE Email = '[email protected]'"

Extract, Transform, and Load the Autopilot Data

With the query results stored in a DataFrame, we can use petl to extract, transform, and load the Autopilot data. In this example, we extract Autopilot data, sort the data by the BusinessName column, and load the data into a CSV file.

Loading Autopilot Data into a CSV File

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

table2 = etl.sort(table1,'BusinessName')

etl.tocsv(table2,'account_data.csv')

With the CData API Driver for Python, you can work with Autopilot data just like you would with any database, including direct access to data in ETL packages like petl.

Free Trial & More Information

Download a free, 30-day trial of the CData API Driver for Python to start building Python apps and scripts with connectivity to Autopilot data. Reach out to our Support Team if you have any questions.

Full Source Code

import petl as etl
import pandas as pd
import cdata.api as mod

cnxn = mod.connect("Profile=C:\profiles\Autopilot.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key';")

sql = "SELECT At, BusinessName FROM Account WHERE Email = '[email protected]'"

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

table2 = etl.sort(table1,'BusinessName')

etl.tocsv(table2,'account_data.csv')