Visualize Amazon Athena Data in Sisense

Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism

Create an ElastiCube in Sisense app with access to Amazon Athena data.

Sisense lets you join, analyze, and picture data to make more intelligent business decisions and craft effective strategies. The CData JDBC Driver for Amazon Athena makes it easy to integrate with Amazon Athena data in Sisense. This article shows how to create an ElastiCube that connects to Amazon Athena data and use the ElastiCube to visualize Amazon Athena data in Sisense.

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 the Connection to Amazon Athena

Before creating the ElastiCube, note the installation location for the JAR file for the JDBC Driver (typically C:\Program Files\CData\CData JDBC Driver for Amazon Athena 20XX\lib) or copy the jar file (cdata.jdbc.amazonathena.AmazonAthena.jar) to a new folder in the Sisense JDBC driver directory (typically C:\ProgramData\Sisense\DataConnectors\jdbcdrivers).

In the Data page of the Sisense application, create a new ElastiCube (or open an existing one).
In the Model Editor, click "+ Data" to open the Add Data dialog box.
Click Generic JDBC to open the JDBC settings. 👁 Connecting via JDBC
Set the connection string property to the JDBC URL for Amazon Athena, adding required properties.
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.

Built-in Connection String Designer

For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the Amazon Athena JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.
```
java -jar cdata.jdbc.amazonathena.jar
```
Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.
👁 Using the built-in connection string designer to generate a JDBC URL (Salesforce is shown.)

When you configure the JDBC URL, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

A typical example follows:
```
jdbc:amazonathena:AWSAccessKey='a123';AWSSecretKey='s123';AWSRegion='IRELAND';Database='sampledb';S3StagingDirectory='s3://bucket/staging/';
```
Set the JDBC JARs folder property to the location of the CData JDBC Driver JAR file (see above).
Set the driver's class name to the class name for the JDBC Driver: cdata.jdbc.amazonathena.AmazonAthenaDriver
Leave the username and password properties blank.
Click Next. 👁 A configured connection in Sisense (HubSpot is shown).

Add Amazon Athena Data to an ElastiCube

Once you are connected to Amazon Athena, you can add tables and views to your ElastiCubes.

From the Tables list, select the tables and/or views you wish to work with.
(Optional) Click "+" to customize the data you want to import with SQL.
Click Done. 👁 Selected tables to add to the ElastiCube
Click Build to build the ElastiCube for analytics.