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

⇱ Visualize Live Amazon Athena Data in Power BI (via CData Connect AI)

Visualize Live Amazon Athena Data in Power BI (via CData Connect AI)

👁 Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Use the CData Power BI Connector and CData Connect AI to integrate live Amazon Athena data into custom reports in Power BI.

Power BI transforms your company's data into rich visuals for you to collect and organize so you can focus on what matters to you. When paired with CData Connect AI, you get access to Amazon Athena data for visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article shows how to use CData Connect to create a live connection to Amazon Athena, connect to Amazon Athena data from Power BI and then create reports on Amazon Athena data in Power BI.

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


Configure Amazon Athena Connectivity for Power BI

Connectivity to Amazon Athena from Power BI is made possible through CData Connect AI. To work with Amazon Athena data from Power BI, 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 Power BI.

Query Amazon Athena Tables

Follow the steps below to build a query to pull Amazon Athena data into the report:

  1. Open Power BI Desktop and click Get Data -> Online Services -> CData Connect AI and click "Connect"
  2. Click "Sign in" and authenticate with your CData Connect AI account 👁 Authenticating with Connect AI
  3. After signing in, click "Connect" 👁 Connecting to Connect AI
  4. Select tables in the Navigator dialog 👁 The available tables. (Salesforce tables are shown)
  5. Click Load to establish the connection to your Amazon Athena data from Power BI

Create Amazon Athena Data Visualizations

After connecting to the data into Power BI, you can create data visualizations in the Report view by dragging fields from the Fields pane onto the canvas. Select the dimensions and measures you wish to visualize along with the chart type.

👁 Visualizing data in Power BI (Salesforce data is shown)

Click Refresh to synchronize your report with any changes to the data.

Live Access to Amazon Athena Data from Data Applications

With CData Connect AI you have a direct connection to Amazon Athena data from Power BI. You can import more data, create new visualizations, build reports, and more — all without replicating Amazon Athena data.

To get SQL data access to hundreds of SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources (including Amazon Athena) directly from your on-premise BI, reporting, ETL and other data applications, visit the CData Connect AI page and start a free trial.