Use the CData JDBC Driver for Amazon Athena in MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy is an analytics and mobility platform that enables data-driven innovation. When you pair MicroStrategy with the CData JDBC Driver for Amazon Athena, you gain database-like access to live Amazon Athena data from MicroStrategy, expanding your reporting and analytics capabilities. In this article, we walk through creating a database instance for Amazon Athena in MicroStrategy Developer and create a Warehouse Catalog for the Amazon Athena data.

The CData JDBC Driver offers unmatched performance for interacting with live Amazon Athena data in MicroStrategy due to optimized data processing built into the driver. When you issue complex SQL queries from MicroStrategy to Amazon Athena, the driver pushes supported SQL operations, like filters and aggregations, directly to Amazon Athena and utilizes the embedded SQL engine to process unsupported operations (often SQL functions and JOIN operations) client-side. With built-in dynamic metadata querying, you can visualize and analyze Amazon Athena data using native MicroStrategy data types.

Connect to Amazon Athena in MicroStrategy Developer

You can connect to Amazon Athena in MicroStrategy Developer by adding a database instance based on the CData JDBC Driver for Amazon Athena.^* Before you begin, you will need to install the JDBC Driver for Amazon Athena on the machine hosting the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server that your instance of MicroStrategy Developer is connected to.

1. Open MicroStrategy Developer and select a Project Source.
2. Navigate to Administration -> Configuration Managers -> Database Instances and right-click to add a new instance.
3. Name the instance, select Generic DBMS as the database connection type, and create a new database connection.
4. In the database connection wizard, name the connection and create a new Database Login name, setting the user and password for Amazon Athena.
5. On the Advanced tab for the connection wizard, set the additional connection string parameters as follows.
   • Add the JDBC keyword to the connection string.
   • Set MSTR_JDBC_JAR_FOLDER to the path of the directory containing the JAR file for the JDBC driver. (C:\Program Files\CData JDBC Driver for Amazon Athena\lib\ on Windows.)
   • Set DRIVER to cdata.jdbc.amazonathena.AmazonAthenaDriver, the driver class.
   • Set URL to the JDBC URL for the Amazon Athena driver, which contains the necessary connection 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 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.

     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.

     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.

   Typical additional connection string properties follow:

   JDBC;MSTR_JDBC_JAR_FOLDER=PATH\TO\JAR\;DRIVER=cdata.jdbc.amazonathena.AmazonAthenaDriver;URL={jdbc:amazonathena:AccessKey='a123';SecretKey='s123';Region='IRELAND';Database='sampledb';S3StagingDirectory='s3://bucket/staging/';};
6. Ensure that you have not selected an ODBC data source (this will trigger MicroStrategy to use the additional connection string parameters to build the database instance) and click OK.
7. Click OK to close the database instance wizard.
8. In the Project Source, right-click the project and open the Project configuration.
9. Navigate to Database Instances, select the newly created database instance, and click OK.
10. Close MicroStrategy Developer and restart the connected MicroStrategy Intelligence Server to complete the database instance creation.

With the database instance configured, you will now be able to connect to Amazon Athena data from the Warehouse Catalog and Data Import.

Connect to Amazon Athena Data from the Warehouse Catalog

Once you have created a database instance based on the JDBC Driver for Amazon Athena, you can connect to data from the Warehouse Catalog.

1. Select your project and click Schema -> Warehouse Catalog.
2. In the Read Settings for the Catalog, click Settings and set the queries to retrieve the schema:
   • To retrieve the list of tables, use the following query: SELECT * FROM SYS_TABLES
   • To retrieve the list of columns for selected tables, use the following query: SELECT DISTINCT CatalogName NAME_SPACE, TableName TAB_NAME, ColumnName COL_NAME, DataTypeName DATA_TYPE, Length DATA_LEN, NumericPrecision DATA_PREC, NumericScale DATA_SCALE FROM SYS_TABLECOLUMNS WHERE TableName IN (#TABLE_LIST#) ORDER BY 1,2,3
3. Select tables to be used in the project.

Using the CData JDBC Driver for Amazon Athena in MicroStrategy, you can easily create robust visualizations and reports on Amazon Athena data. Read our other articles on connecting to Amazon Athena in MictroStrategy Web and connecting to Amazon Athena in MicroStrategy Desktop for more information.

Note: Connecting using a JDBC Driver requires a 3- or 4-Tier Architecture.