VOOZH about

URL: https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/athena-cloud-excel-desktop.rst

⇱ Access Live Amazon Athena Data in Excel (Desktop) via Connect AI

Access Live Amazon Athena Data in Excel (Desktop) via Connect AI

👁 Dibyendu Datta
Dibyendu Datta
Lead Technology Evangelist
Use CData Connect AI to gain access to live Amazon Athena data from your Excel spreadsheets.

Microsoft Excel is a widely used spreadsheet software application, primarily used for tasks related to data management, analysis, and visualization. When combined with CData Connect AI, you gain immediate access to Amazon Athena data directly within Excel, facilitating data analysis, collaboration, calculations, and more.This article shows how to connect to Amazon Athena in your Connect AI instance and access and update live Amazon Athena data in Excel spreadsheets.

CData Connect AI provides a pure cloud-to-cloud interface for Amazon Athena, allowing you to easily access live Amazon Athena data in Excel for the web. Simply use the Connect AI Add-In to query live data (or write your own). Using optimized data processing out of the box, CData Connect AI pushes all supported query operations (filters, JOINs, etc) directly to Amazon Athena, leveraging server-side processing to quickly return Amazon Athena data.

About Amazon Athena Data Integration

CData provides the easiest way to access and integrate live data from Amazon Athena. Customers use CData connectivity to:

  • Authenticate securely using a variety of methods, including IAM credentials, access keys, and Instance Profiles, catering to diverse security needs and simplifying the authentication process.
  • Streamline their setup and quickly resolve issue with detailed error messaging.
  • Enhance performance and minimize strain on client resources with server-side query execution.

Users frequently integrate Athena with analytics tools like Tableau, Power BI, and Excel for in-depth analytics from their preferred tools.

To learn more about unique Amazon Athena use cases with CData, check out our blog post: https://www.cdata.com/blog/amazon-athena-use-cases.


Getting Started


This setup requires a CData Connect AI instance and the CData Connect AI Add-In for Excel. To get started, sign up a free trial of Connect AI and install the free Connect AI Excel Add-In.


Configure Amazon Athena Connectivity for Excel

Connectivity to Amazon Athena from Excel is made possible through CData Connect AI. To work with Amazon Athena data from Excel, we start by creating and configuring a Amazon Athena connection.

  1. Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection
    2. 👁 Adding a Connection
  2. Select "Amazon Athena" from the Add Connection panel
    3. 👁 Selecting a data source
  3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Amazon Athena.

    Authenticating to Amazon Athena

    To authorize Amazon Athena requests, provide the credentials for an administrator account or for an IAM user with custom permissions: Set to the access key Id. Set to the secret access key.

    Note: Though you can connect as the AWS account administrator, it is recommended to use IAM user credentials to access AWS services.

    Obtaining the Access Key

    To obtain the credentials for an IAM user, follow the steps below:

    1. Sign into the IAM console.
    2. In the navigation pane, select Users.
    3. To create or manage the access keys for a user, select the user and then select the Security Credentials tab.

    To obtain the credentials for your AWS root account, follow the steps below:

    1. Sign into the AWS Management console with the credentials for your root account.
    2. Select your account name or number and select My Security Credentials in the menu that is displayed.
    3. Click Continue to Security Credentials and expand the Access Keys section to manage or create root account access keys.

    Authenticating from an EC2 Instance

    If you are using the CData Data Provider for Amazon Athena 2018 from an EC2 Instance and have an IAM Role assigned to the instance, you can use the IAM Role to authenticate. To do so, set to true and leave and empty. The CData Data Provider for Amazon Athena 2018 will automatically obtain your IAM Role credentials and authenticate with them.

    Authenticating as an AWS Role

    In many situations it may be preferable to use an IAM role for authentication instead of the direct security credentials of an AWS root user. An AWS role may be used instead by specifying the . This will cause the CData Data Provider for Amazon Athena 2018 to attempt to retrieve credentials for the specified role. If you are connecting to AWS (instead of already being connected such as on an EC2 instance), you must additionally specify the and of an IAM user to assume the role for. Roles may not be used when specifying the and of an AWS root user.

    Authenticating with MFA

    For users and roles that require Multi-factor Authentication, specify the and connection properties. This will cause the CData Data Provider for Amazon Athena 2018 to submit the MFA credentials in a request to retrieve temporary authentication credentials. Note that the duration of the temporary credentials may be controlled via the (default 3600 seconds).

    Connecting to Amazon Athena

    In addition to the and properties, specify , and . Set to the region where your Amazon Athena data is hosted. Set to a folder in S3 where you would like to store the results of queries.

    If is not set in the connection, the data provider connects to the default database set in Amazon Athena.

    👁 Configuring a connection (Salesforce is shown)
  4. Click Save & Test
  5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add Amazon Athena Connection page and update the User-based permissions. 👁 Updating permissions

With the connection configured, you are ready to connect to Amazon Athena data from Excel.

Access Live Amazon Athena Data in Excel

The steps below outline connecting to CData Connect AI from Excel to access live Amazon Athena data.

  1. Open Excel, create a new sheet (or open an existing one).
  2. Click Insert and click Get Add-ins. (if you have already installed the Add-In, jump to step 4).
  3. Search for CData Connect AI Add-In and install the Add-in. 👁 Install the Add-In
  4. Click Data and open the CData Connect AI Add-In.
  5. In the Add-In panel, click Authorize to authenticate with your CData Connect AI instance 👁 Authorizing the Add-In
  6. In the CData Connect AI panel in Excel, click Import 👁 CData Connect AI panel in Excel
  7. Choose a Connection (e.g. AmazonAthena1), Table (e.g. Customers), and Columns to import 👁 CData Connect AI panel in Excel
  8. Optionally add Filters, Sorting, and a Limit 👁 Choosing a Connection, Table, and Columns
  9. Click Execute to import the data 👁 Executing the Query

Update Amazon Athena Data from Excel

In addition to viewing Amazon Athena data in Excel, CData Connect AI also lets you update and delete Amazon Athena data. Begin by importing data (as described above).

  1. Update any cell or cells with changes you want to push to Amazon Athena (your changes will be in red)
  2. In the CData Connect AI Add-In panel, select Update
  3. Optionally highlight the cell(s) you wish to update and select an update option ("Update All" or "Update Selected") 👁 Executing the update (Salesforce is shown).
  4. Click Execute to push the updates to Amazon Athena, and a notification will appear when the update is complete

    5. Live Access to Amazon Athena Data from Cloud Applications

    Now, you have a direct, cloud-to-cloud connection to live Amazon Athena data from your Excel workbook. You can add more data to your workbook for calculations, aggregations, collaboration, and more.

    👁 Imported data (Salesforce is shown)

    Try CData Connect AI and get real-time data access to hundreds of SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources directly from your cloud applications.