Configure the CData JDBC Driver for Hugging Face in a Connection Pool in Tomcat

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Connect to Hugging Face data from a connection pool in Tomcat.

The CData JDBC Drivers support standard JDBC interfaces to integrate with Web applications running on the JVM. This article details how to connect to Hugging Face data from a connection pool in Tomcat.

Connect to Hugging Face Data through a Connection Pool in Tomcat

  1. Copy the CData JAR and CData .lic file to $CATALINA_HOME/lib. The CData JAR is located in the lib subfolder of the installation directory.
  2. Add a definition of the resource to the context. Specify the JDBC URL here.

    HuggingFace Hub uses token-based authentication to enable access to its API. The API provides access to machine learning models, datasets, spaces, papers, and other resources on the HuggingFace Hub platform.

    Using API Key Authentication

    To authenticate to HuggingFace Hub, you will need to provide an API Key (Access Token). To obtain your access token:

    1. Log in to your HuggingFace account at https://huggingface.co
    2. Navigate to Settings > Access Tokens
    3. Click "New token" to create a new access token
    4. Select the appropriate permissions (read or write)
    5. Copy the token value

    After obtaining your access token, set the following connection properties:

    • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
    • APIKey: Set this to your HuggingFace access token.

    Example connection string

    Profile=C:\profiles\HuggingFace.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=hf_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx';
    

    Built-in Connection String Designer

    For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the Hugging Face JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.

    java -jar cdata.jdbc.api.jar
    

    Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

    You can see the JDBC URL specified in the resource definition below.

    
    <Resource name="jdbc/api"   auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource" driverClassName="cdata.jdbc.api.APIDriver" factory="org.apache.tomcat.jdbc.pool.DataSourceFactory" url="jdbc:api:Profile=C:\profiles\HuggingFace.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=hf_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx';" maxActive="20" maxIdle="10" maxWait="-1" />
    

    To allow a single application to access Hugging Face data, add the code above to the context.xml in the application's META-INF directory.

    For a shared resource configuration, add the code above to the context.xml located in $CATALINA_BASE/conf. A shared resource configuration provides connectivity to Hugging Face for all applications.

  3. Add a reference to the resource to the web.xml for the application.
    
      Hugging Face data JSP
      jdbc/API
      javax.sql.DataSource
      Container
    
    
  4. Initialize connections from the connection pool:
    Context initContext = new InitialContext();
    Context envContext  = (Context)initContext.lookup("java:/comp/env");
    DataSource ds = (DataSource)envContext.lookup("jdbc/API");
    Connection conn = ds.getConnection();
      

More Tomcat Integration

The steps above show how to connect to Hugging Face data in a simple connection pooling scenario. For more use cases and information, see the JNDI Datasource How-To in the Tomcat documentation.

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