How to create Hugging Face federated tables in MySQL

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Use the SQL Gateway and the ODBC Driver to set up federated tables for Hugging Face data in MySQL .

You can use the SQL Gateway to configure a MySQL remoting service and set up federated tables for Hugging Face data. The service is a daemon process that provides a MySQL interface to the CData ODBC Driver for Hugging Face: After you have started the service, you can create a server and tables using the FEDERATED Storage Engine in MySQL. You can then work with Hugging Face data just as you would local MySQL tables.

Connect to Hugging Face Data

If you have not already done so, provide values for the required connection properties in the data source name (DSN). You can use the built-in Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to configure the DSN. This is also the last step of the driver installation. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure a DSN.

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';

Configure the SQL Gateway

See the SQL Gateway Overview to set up connectivity to Hugging Face data as a virtual MySQL database. You will configure a MySQL remoting service that listens for MySQL requests from clients. The service can be configured in the SQL Gateway UI.

Creating a MySQL Remoting Service in SQL Gateway (Salesforce is shown)

Create a FEDERATED Server and Tables for Hugging Face Data

After you have configured and started the service, create a FEDERATED server to simplify the process of creating FEDERATED tables:

Create a FEDERATED Server

The following statement will create a FEDERATED server based on the ODBC Driver for Hugging Face. Note that the username and password of the FEDERATED server must match a user account you defined on the Users tab of the SQL Gateway.

CREATE SERVER fedAPI
FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER mysql
OPTIONS (USER 'sql_gateway_user', PASSWORD 'sql_gateway_passwd', HOST 'sql_gateway_host', PORT ####, DATABASE 'CData API Sys');

Create a FEDERATED Table

To create a FEDERATED table using our newly created server, use the CONNECTION keyword and pass the name of the FEDERATED server and the remote table (Collections). Refer to the following template for the statement to create a FEDERATED table:

CREATE TABLE fed_collections (
  ...,
    TYPE(LEN),
    TYPE(LEN),
  ...,
)
ENGINE=FEDERATED
DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
CONNECTION='fedAPI/collections';

NOTE: The table schema for the FEDERATED table must match the remote table schema exactly. You can always connect directly to the MySQL remoting service using any MySQL client and run a SHOW CREATE TABLE query to get the table schema.

Execute Queries

You can now execute queries to the Hugging Face FEDERATED tables from any tool that can connect to MySQL, which is particularly useful if you need to JOIN data from a local table with data from Hugging Face. Refer to the following example:

SELECT 
  fed_collections., 
  local_table.custom_field 
FROM 
  local_table 
JOIN 
  fed_collections 
ON 
  local_table.foreign_ = fed_collections.;

Ready to get started?

Connect to live data from Hugging Face with the API Driver

Connect to Hugging Face