Build Amazon S3-Connected Dashboards in Redash

Redash lets you connect and query your data sources, build dashboards to visualize data and share them with your company. When paired with CData Connect Server, you get instant, cloud-to-cloud access to Amazon S3 data for visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article shows how to create a virtual database for Amazon S3 and build visualizations from Amazon S3 data in Redash.

CData Connect Server provides a pure SQL Server interface for Amazon S3, allowing you to easily build reports from live Amazon S3 data in Redash — without replicating the data to a natively supported database. As you build visualizations, Redash generates SQL queries to gather data. Using optimized data processing out of the box, CData Connect Server pushes all supported SQL operations (filters, JOINs, etc) directly to Amazon S3, leveraging server-side processing to quickly return the requested Amazon S3 data.

Create a Virtual SQL Server Database for Amazon S3 Data

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

1. Login to Connect Server and click Connections.
2. Select "Amazon S3" from Available Data Sources.
3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Amazon S3.

   To authorize Amazon S3 requests, provide the credentials for an administrator account or for an IAM user with custom permissions. Set AccessKey to the access key Id. Set SecretKey to the secret access key.

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

   For information on obtaining the credentials and other authentication methods, refer to the Getting Started section of the Help documentation.

4. Click Save Changes
5. Click Privileges -> Add and add the new user (or an existing user) with the appropriate permissions.

With the virtual database created, you are ready to connect to Amazon S3 data from Redash.

Visualize Amazon S3 Data in Redash

The steps below outline creating a new data source in Redash based on the virtual Amazon S3 database in Connect Server and building a simple visualization from the data.

Create a New Data Source

1. Log into Redash, click on your profile and click "Data Sources"
2. Click the " New Data Source" button
3. Select "Microsoft SQL Server" as the Data Source Type
4. On the configuration tab, set the following properties:
   • Name: Name the data source (e.g. Amazon S3 (CData Connect))
   • Host: The full URL to your CData Connect instance (e.g. https://connect_server_url)
   • Port: The port of the CData Connect SQL Server endpoint (e.g. 1433)
   • User: A CData Connect user
   • Password: The password for the above user
   • Database name: The name of the virtual database for Amazon S3 (e.g. AmazonS31)
   • Click the checkbox to Use SSQL
5. Click Create
6. Click the "Test Connection" button to ensure you have configured the connection properly

With the new Data Source created, we are ready to visualize our Amazon S3 data.

Create a Amazon S3 Data Visualization

1. Click Create -> New Query
2. Select the newly created Data Source (you can explore the data structure in the New Query wizard)
3. Write a SQL statement to retrieve the data, for example:
   SELECT Name, OwnerId FROM ObjectsACL WHERE Name = 'TestBucket'
4. Click the "Execute" button to load Amazon S3 data into Redash via CData Connect
5. Use the Visualization Editor to create and analyze graphs from Amazon S3 data
6. You can schedule the query to refresh and update the visualization periodically

SQL Access to Amazon S3 Data from Cloud Applications

At this point, you have a direct, cloud-to-cloud connection to Amazon S3 data from Redash. You can create new visualizations, build dashboards, and more. For more information on gaining SQL access to data from more than 100 SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources from cloud applications like Redash, refer to our Connect Server page.