Prepare, Blend, and Analyze Amazon Athena Data in Alteryx Designer

Alteryx is a software platform that allows people to work with data more easily. When paired with CData Connect Cloud, Alteryx provides instant access to Amazon Athena data from your data automation processes. This article demonstrates how to connect to Amazon Athena using Connect Cloud and work with Amazon Athena data in Alteryx.

CData Connect Cloud offers a dedicated SQL Server interface for Amazon Athena, facilitating data querying without the need for data replication to a native database. With built-in optimized data processing capabilities, CData Connect Cloud efficiently directs all supported SQL operations, including filters and JOINs, straight to Amazon Athena. This harnesses server-side processing to rapidly retrieve the desired Amazon Athena data.

Configure Amazon Athena Connectivity for Alteryx

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

1. Log into Connect Cloud, click Connections and click Add Connection
2. Select "Amazon Athena" from the Add Connection panel
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 AccessKey to the access key Id. Set SecretKey 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 UseEC2Roles to true and leave AccessKey and SecretKey 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 RoleARN. 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 AccessKey and SecretKey of an IAM user to assume the role for. Roles may not be used when specifying the AccessKey and SecretKey of an AWS root user.

   Authenticating with MFA

   For users and roles that require Multi-factor Authentication, specify the MFASerialNumber and MFAToken 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 TemporaryTokenDuration (default 3600 seconds).

   Connecting to Amazon Athena

   In addition to the AccessKey and SecretKey properties, specify Database, S3StagingDirectory and Region. Set Region to the region where your Amazon Athena data is hosted. Set S3StagingDirectory to a folder in S3 where you would like to store the results of queries.

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

4. Click Create & Test
5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add Amazon Athena Connection page and update the User-based permissions.

Connect to Amazon Athena from Alteryx

Once you establish a connection to Amazon Athena in Connect Cloud, you are ready to work with Amazon Athena data in Alteryx. To begin, download the ODBC Driver for CData Connect.

1. In the ODBC Driver for CData Connect, select OAuth and click Test Connection. Then enter your CData Connect Cloud Credentials and Sign in.
2. Open Alteryx Designer and create a new workflow.
3. Drag and drop a new input data tool onto the workflow.
4. Click the drop down under Connect a File or Database and select the Data sources tab.
5. Navigate to the end of the page and click on ODBC under Generic connection.
6. Select the DSN that you configured for use in Alteryx.
7. In the wizard that opens, drag and drop the table to be queried in the Query Builder box. Select the fields by checking the boxes that you wish to include in your query. Where possible, the complex queries generated by the filters and aggregations will be pushed down to your data source, while any unsupported operations (which can include SQL functions and JOIN operations) will be managed client-side by the CData SQL engine embedded in the connector.

To further customize the dataset, you can open the SQL Editor and modify the query manually, adding clauses, aggregations, and other operations to ensure that you are retrieving exactly the data desired.

With the query defined, you are ready to work with your data in Alteryx Designer.

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