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Model, Search, and Visualize Live Amazon Athena Data in ThoughtSpot
Use CData Connect Cloud to connect to live Amazon Athena data for modeling, searching, and visualizing.
ThoughtSpot is a cloud-based analytics platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to help users analyze data and make decisions. When paired with CData Connect Cloud, you get instant, cloud-to-cloud access to Amazon Athena data for visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article shows how to connect to Amazon Athena and build visualizations from Amazon Athena data in ThoughtSpot.
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
CData Connect Cloud provides a pure SQL Server, cloud-to-cloud interface for Amazon Athena, allowing you to easily build models and visualizations from live Amazon Athena data in ThoughtSpot. As you build visualizations, ThoughtSpot generates SQL queries to gather data. Using optimized data processing out of the box, CData Connect Cloud pushes all supported SQL operations (filters, JOINs, etc) directly to Amazon Athena, leveraging server-side processing to quickly return Amazon Athena data.
Configure Amazon Athena Connectivity for ThoughtSpot
Connectivity to Amazon Athena from ThoughtSpot is made possible through CData Connect Cloud. To work with Amazon Athena data from ThoughtSpot, we start by creating and configuring a Amazon Athena connection.
- Log into Connect Cloud, click Connections and click Add Connection
- Select "Amazon Athena" from the Add Connection panel
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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:
- 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.
- Click Create & Test
- Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add Amazon Athena Connection page and update the User-based permissions.
Add a Personal Access Token
If you are connecting from a service, application, platform, or framework that does not support OAuth authentication, you can create a Personal Access Token (PAT) to use for authentication. Best practices would dictate that you create a separate PAT for each service, to maintain granularity of access.
- Click on your username at the top right of the Connect Cloud app and click User Profile.
- On the User Profile page, scroll down to the Personal Access Tokens section and click Create PAT.
- Give your PAT a name and click Create.
- The personal access token is only visible at creation, so be sure to copy it and store it securely for future use.
With the connection configured, you are ready to connect to Amazon Athena data from ThoughtSpot.
Model, Search, and Visualize Live Amazon Athena Data in ThoughtSpot
To establish a connection from ThoughtSpot to the CData Connect Cloud Virtual SQL Server API, follow these steps.
- Log into ThoughtSpot
- On the top navigation bar, click Data.
- Click Create new > Connection.
- Name the connection and click "SQL Server" as the data warehouse.
- Click Continue on the top right.
- Enter the connection settings:
- Host: enter the Virtual SQL Server endpoint: tds.cdata.com
- Port: : enter 14333
- Username: enter your CData Connect Cloud username. This is displayed in the top-right corner of the CData Connect Cloud interface. For example, user@domain.com.
- Password: enter the PAT you generated on the Settings page.
- Database: enter the Connection Name of the CData Connect Cloud data source you want to connect to (for example, AmazonAthena1).
- Click Continue.
- After connecting successfully, you will be able to choose which tables to include.
- Click Create Connection.
After you successfully configure your connection, you can build models, search, and visualize your Amazon Athena data.
Real-Time Access to Amazon Athena Data from Cloud Applications
At this point, you have a direct, cloud-to-cloud connection to live Amazon Athena data from ThoughtSpot. You can model, search, and visualize your data from ThoughtSpot . For more information on gaining live access to data from more than 100 SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources from cloud applications like ThoughtSpot, refer to our Connect Cloud page.
