Connect to Live Amazon Athena Data in PostGresSQL Interface through CData Connect AI

There are a vast number of PostgreSQL clients available on the Internet. PostgreSQL is a popular interface for data access. When you pair PostgreSQL with CData Connect AI, you gain database-like access to live Amazon Athena data from PostgreSQL. In this article, we walk through the process of connecting to Amazon Athena data in Connect AI and establishing a connection between Connect AI and PostgreSQL using a TDS foreign data wrapper (FDW).

CData Connect AI provides a pure SQL Server interface for Amazon Athena, allowing you to query data from Amazon Athena without replicating the data to a natively supported database. Using optimized data processing out of the box, CData Connect AI pushes all supported SQL operations (filters, JOINs, etc.) directly to Amazon Athena, leveraging server-side processing to return the requested Amazon Athena data quickly.

Getting Started

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Connect to Amazon Athena in Connect AI

CData Connect AI uses a straightforward, point-and-click interface to connect to data sources.

1. Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection
👁 Adding a Connection

2. Select "Amazon Athena" from the Add Connection panel
👁 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
   

Add a Personal Access Token

When connecting to Connect AI through the REST API, the OData API, or the Virtual SQL Server, a Personal Access Token (PAT) is used to authenticate the connection to Connect AI. It is best practice to create a separate PAT for each service to maintain granularity of access.

1. Click on the Gear icon () at the top right of the Connect AI app to open the settings page.
2. On the Settings page, go to the Access Tokens section and click Create PAT.
3. Give the PAT a name and click Create. 👁 Creating a new PAT
   
4. The personal access token is only visible at creation, so be sure to copy it and store it securely for future use.

With the connection configured and a PAT generated, you are ready to connect to Amazon Athena data from PostgreSQL.

Build the TDS Foreign Data Wrapper

The Foreign Data Wrapper can be installed as an extension to PostgreSQL, without recompiling PostgreSQL. The tds_fdw extension is used as an example (https://github.com/tds-fdw/tds_fdw).

1. You can clone and build the git repository via something like the following view source:

   sudo apt-get install git
   git clone https://github.com/tds-fdw/tds_fdw.git
   cd tds_fdw
   make USE_PGXS=1
   sudo make USE_PGXS=1 install
   

   Note: If you have several PostgreSQL versions and you do not want to build for the default one, first locate where the binary for pg_config is, take note of the full path, and then append PG_CONFIG=
2. After you finish the installation, then start the server:

   sudo service postgresql start
   

3. Then go inside the Postgres database

   psql -h localhost -U postgres -d postgres
   

   Note: Instead of localhost you can put the IP where your PostgreSQL is hosted.

Connect to Amazon Athena data as a PostgreSQL Database and query the data!

After you have installed the extension, follow the steps below to start executing queries to Amazon Athena data:

1. Log into your database.
2. Load the extension for the database:

   CREATE EXTENSION tds_fdw;
   

3. Create a server object for Amazon Athena data:

   CREATE SERVER "AmazonAthena1" FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER tds_fdw OPTIONS (servername'tds.cdata.com', port '14333', database 'AmazonAthena1');
   

4. Configure user mapping with your email and Personal Access Token from your Connect AI account:

   CREATE USER MAPPING for postgres SERVER "AmazonAthena1" OPTIONS (username '[email protected]', password 'your_personal_access_token' );
   

5. Create the local schema:

   CREATE SCHEMA "AmazonAthena1";
   

6. Create a foreign table in your local database:

   #Using a table_name definition:
   
   CREATE FOREIGN TABLE "AmazonAthena1".Customers ( 
   id varchar, 
   TotalDue varchar) 
   SERVER "AmazonAthena1"
   OPTIONS(table_name 'AmazonAthena.Customers', row_estimate_method 'showplan_all');
   
   #Or using a schema_name and table_name definition:
   
   CREATE FOREIGN TABLE "AmazonAthena1".Customers ( 
   id varchar, 
   TotalDue varchar) 
   SERVER "AmazonAthena1"
   OPTIONS (schema_name 'AmazonAthena', table_name 'Customers', row_estimate_method 'showplan_all');
   
   #Or using a query definition:
   
   CREATE FOREIGN TABLE "AmazonAthena1".Customers (
   id varchar, 
   TotalDue varchar) 
   SERVER "AmazonAthena1"
   OPTIONS (query 'SELECT * FROM AmazonAthena.Customers', row_estimate_method 'showplan_all');
   
   #Or setting a remote column name:
   
   CREATE FOREIGN TABLE "AmazonAthena1".Customers (
   id varchar,
   col2 varchar OPTIONS (column_name 'TotalDue'))
   SERVER "AmazonAthena1"
   OPTIONS (schema_name 'AmazonAthena', table_name 'Customers', row_estimate_method 'showplan_all');
   

7. You can now execute read/write commands to Amazon Athena:

   SELECT id, TotalDue
   FROM "AmazonAthena1".Customers;
   

More Information & Free Trial

Now, you have created a simple query from live Amazon Athena data. For more information on connecting to Amazon Athena (and more than 200 other data sources), visit the Connect AI page. Sign up for a free trial and start working with live Amazon Athena data in PostgreSQL.