Automate Exa Integration Tasks from PowerShell

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Are you in search of a quick and easy way to access Exa data from PowerShell? This article demonstrates how to utilize the Exa Cmdlets for tasks like connecting to Exa data, automating operations, downloading data, and more.

The CData API Driver for ADO.NET is a standard ADO.NET Provider that make it easy to accomplish data cleansing, normalization, backup, and other integration tasks by enabling real-time access to Exa.

ADO.NET Provider

The ADO.NET Provider provides a SQL interface for Exa; this tutorial shows how to use the Provider to retrieve Exa data.

Once you have acquired the necessary connection properties, accessing Exa data in PowerShell can be enabled in three steps.

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

Exa API Profile Settings

Visit dashboard.exa.ai, sign in or create an account, and generate an API key from your API settings.

  1. Load the provider's assembly:

    [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile("C:\Program Files\CData\CData API Driver for ADO.NET\lib\System.Data.CData.API.dll")
        
  2. Connect to Exa:

     
    $conn= New-Object System.Data.CData.API.APIConnection("Profile=C:\profiles\Exa.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key';")
    $conn.Open()
    
  3. Instantiate the APIDataAdapter, execute an SQL query, and output the results:

    $sql="SELECT RequestId, Answer from Answer"
    
    $da= New-Object System.Data.CData.API.APIDataAdapter($sql, $conn)
    $dt= New-Object System.Data.DataTable
    $da.Fill($dt)
    
    $dt.Rows | foreach {
    	Write-Host $_.requestid $_.answer
    }
      

Ready to get started?

Connect to live data from Exa with the API Driver

Connect to Exa