Create a Data Access Object for Amazon Athena Data using JDBI

A brief overview of creating a SQL Object API for Amazon Athena data in JDBI.

JDBI is a SQL convenience library for Java that exposes two different style APIs, a fluent style and a SQL object style. The CData JDBC Driver for Amazon Athena integrates connectivity to live Amazon Athena data in Java applications. By pairing these technologies, you gain simple, programmatic access to Amazon Athena data. This article walks through building a basic Data Access Object (DAO) and the accompanying code to read and write Amazon Athena data.

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

Create a DAO for the Amazon Athena Customers Entity

The interface below declares the desired behavior for the SQL object to create a single method for each SQL statement to be implemented.


public interface MyCustomersDAO {
  //insert new data into Amazon Athena
  @SqlUpdate("INSERT INTO Customers (CustomerId, TotalDue) values (:customerId, :totalDue)")
  void insert(@Bind("customerId") String customerId, @Bind("totalDue") String totalDue);

  //request specific data from Amazon Athena (String type is used for simplicity)
  @SqlQuery("SELECT TotalDue FROM Customers WHERE CustomerId = :customerId")
  String findTotalDueByCustomerId(@Bind("customerId") String customerId);

  /*
   * close with no args is used to close the connection
   */
  void close();
}

Open a Connection to Amazon Athena

Collect the necessary connection properties and construct the appropriate JDBC URL for connecting 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:

Sign into the IAM console.
In the navigation pane, select Users.
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:

Sign into the AWS Management console with the credentials for your root account.
Select your account name or number and select My Security Credentials in the menu that is displayed.
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.

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.)

A connection string for Amazon Athena will typically look like the following:

jdbc:amazonathena:AWSAccessKey='a123';AWSSecretKey='s123';AWSRegion='IRELAND';Database='sampledb';S3StagingDirectory='s3://bucket/staging/';

Use the configured JDBC URL to obtain an instance of the DAO interface. The particular method shown below will open a handle bound to the instance, so the instance needs to be closed explicitly to release the handle and the bound JDBC connection.


DBI dbi = new DBI("jdbc:amazonathena:AWSAccessKey='a123';AWSSecretKey='s123';AWSRegion='IRELAND';Database='sampledb';S3StagingDirectory='s3://bucket/staging/';");
MyCustomersDAO dao = dbi.open(MyCustomersDAO.class);

//do stuff with the DAO

dao.close();

Read Amazon Athena Data

With the connection open to Amazon Athena, simply call the previously defined method to retrieve data from the Customers entity in Amazon Athena.


//disply the result of our 'find' method
String totalDue = dao.findTotalDueByCustomerId("12345");
System.out.println(totalDue);

Write Amazon Athena Data

It is also simple to write data to Amazon Athena, using the previously defined method.


//add a new entry to the Customers entity
dao.insert(newCustomerId, newTotalDue);

Since the JDBI library is able to work with JDBC connections, you can easily produce a SQL Object API for Amazon Athena by integrating with the CData JDBC Driver for Amazon Athena. Download a free trial and work with live Amazon Athena data in custom Java applications today.

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