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

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

Connecting to Exa Data

Connecting to Exa 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 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.

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

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

Create a SQL Statement to Query Exa

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

sql = "SELECT RequestId, Answer FROM Answer WHERE RequestId = 'my-request-id'"

Extract, Transform, and Load the Exa Data

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

Loading Exa Data into a CSV File

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

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

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

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

sql = "SELECT RequestId, Answer FROM Answer WHERE RequestId = 'my-request-id'"

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

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

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