PowerShell Scripting to Replicate Twitter Data to MySQL

The CData Cmdlets for Twitter offer live access to Twitter data from within PowerShell. Using PowerShell scripts, you can easily automate regular tasks like data replication. This article will walk through using the CData Cmdlets for Twitter and the CData Cmdlets for MySQL in PowerShell to replicate Twitter data to a MySQL database.

After obtaining the needed connection properties, accessing Twitter data in PowerShell and preparing for replication consists of four basic steps.

All tables require authentication. You can connect using your User and Password or OAuth. To authenticate using OAuth, you can use the embedded OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL or you can register an app to obtain your own.

If you intend to communicate with Twitter only as the currently authenticated user, then you can obtain the OAuthAccessToken and OAuthAccessTokenSecret directly by registering an app.

See the Getting Started chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

Collecting Twitter Data

1. Install the module:

   Install-Module TwitterCmdlets

2. Connect to Twitter:

   $twitter = Connect-Twitter

3. Retrieve the data from a specific resource:

   $data = Select-Twitter -Connection $twitter -Table "Tweets"

   You can also use the Invoke-Twitter cmdlet to execute pure SQL-92 statements:

   $data = Invoke-Twitter -Connection $twitter -Query 'SELECT * FROM Tweets WHERE From_User_Name = @From_User_Name' -Params @{'@From_User_Name'='twitter'}

4. Save a list of the column names from the returned data.

   $columns = ($data | Get-Member -MemberType NoteProperty | Select-Object -Property Name).Name

Inserting Twitter Data into the MySQL Database

With the data and column names collected, you are ready to replicate the data into a MySQL database.

1. Install the module:

   Install-Module MySQLCmdlets

2. Connect to MySQL, using the server address and port of the MySQL server, valid user credentials, and a specific database with the table in which the data will be replicated:

   $mysql = Connect-MySQL -User $User -Password $Password -Database $Database -Server $Server -Port $Port

3. Loop through the Twitter data, store the values, and use the Add-MySQL cmdlet to insert the data into the MySQL database, one row at a time. In this example, the table will need to have the same name as the Twitter resource (Tweets) and to exist in the database.

   $data | % { $row = $_ $values = @() $columns | % { $col = $_ $values += $row.$($col) } Add-MySQL -Connection $mysql -Table "Tweets" -Columns $columns -Values $values }

You have now replicated your Twitter data to a MySQL database. This gives you freedom to work with Twitter data in the same way that you work with other MySQL tables, whether that is performing analytics, building reports, or other business functions.

Notes

• Once you have connected to Twitter and MySQL in PowerShell, you can pipe command results to perform the replication in a single line:

  Select-Twitter -Connection $twitter -Table "Tweets" | % { $row = $_ $values = @() $columns | % { $col = $_ $values += $row.$($col) } Add-MySQL -Connection $mysql -Table "Tweets" -Columns $columns -Values $values }

• If you wish to replicate the Twitter data to another database using another PowerShell module, you will want to exclude the Columns, Connection, and Table columns from the data returned by the Select-Twitter cmdlet since those columns are used to help pipe data from one CData cmdlet to another:

  $columns = ($data | Get-Member -MemberType NoteProperty | Select-Object -Property Name).Name | ? {$_ -NotIn @('Columns','Connection','Table')}