How to Build an ETL App for Clarifai 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 Clarifai-connected applications and pipelines for extracting, transforming, and loading Clarifai data. This article shows how to connect to Clarifai with the CData Python Connector and use petl and pandas to extract, transform, and load Clarifai data.

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

Connecting to Clarifai Data

Connecting to Clarifai 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 Clarifai Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Clarifai.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Clarifai (see below).

Clarifai API Profile Settings

Clarifai uses Personal Access Tokens (PATs) for authentication. To obtain a PAT:

1. Log in to your Clarifai account at https://clarifai.com.
2. Navigate to your profile settings and select Security.
3. Click Create Personal Access Token.
4. Select the required scopes and click Create Token.
5. Copy the generated token (it will only be shown once).

After obtaining your Personal Access Token, set the following connection properties:

• AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.

Set the following in the ProfileSettings connection property:

• APIKey: Set this to your Clarifai Personal Access Token (PAT).

After installing the CData Clarifai Connector, follow the procedure below to install the other required modules and start accessing Clarifai 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 Clarifai 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 Clarifai Connector to create a connection for working with Clarifai data.

cnxn = mod.connect("Profile=C:\profiles\Clarifai.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_personal_access_token';")

Create a SQL Statement to Query Clarifai

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

sql = "SELECT Id, Name FROM Apps WHERE UserId = 'my-user-id'"

Extract, Transform, and Load the Clarifai Data

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

Loading Clarifai Data into a CSV File

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

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

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

With the CData API Driver for Python, you can work with Clarifai 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 Clarifai 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\Clarifai.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_personal_access_token';")

sql = "SELECT Id, Name FROM Apps WHERE UserId = 'my-user-id'"

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

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

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