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Connect to Athena Tables from Tableau

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Tableau offers a robust API for integration when applied to these two use cases:

  • You can obtain Tableau’s dashboard contents and embed them in any application. For future consideration, this may be useful to TetraScience if you want to embed your Tableau generated graphs within the TetraScience dashboard.

  • Create an interface between the Tetra Data Platform (TDP) and the Tableau servers. You can use this interface to use the data processed and stored in the Data Lake. You can then process and store the created graphs (and any other analytics completed with Tableau) back to the TDP. Our metadata tagging capabilities enable you to organize and easily access all of your data in one central location.

Tableau also offers the ability to integrate with many Data Science programming languages. For example, your Bioinformatics team can perform any computational experiments with the data and then integrate it with the Tableau dashboard. You can then send the final analysis or report to the TDP for storage and organization.

  • To learn how to overlay data from multiple sources for reporting purposes, you can watch this quick tutorial.
  • To add labels inside the created graphs, you can watch this quick video.

Once you build the interfaces between your data sources and Tableau, you can conduct graphical analysis.

How to Connect Athena with Tableau

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that allows you to use standard SQL to view and analyze data in your organization's Tetra Data Lake S3 bucket. This page describes how to connect to your Athena tables from the Tableau third-party tool.

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Reference Pages

  • Click here for Tableau-provided guidance on how to connect to Amazon Athena. TetraScience recommends that you keep this page open as a reference when you connect to Athena.
  • Click here for a Tableau-guided blog on Athena installation.

This is a summarized procedure with additional TetraScience-specific information.
To connect Athena with Tableau:

  1. Download and install Java and the JDBC driver - If you have not already downloaded Java and the JDBC driver, do so now. This JDBC driver is required to connect to Athena. Click here for instructions on downloading and installing the driver from the Amazon Athena dropdown.

  2. Get the AWS Credentials to Query Athena SQL tables. For instructions, see Get AWS Credentials to Query Athena SQL Tables.

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Record AWS Password

When you generate your AWS password, be sure to record it; otherwise, you will need to replace it in the future.

The URL contains your AWS server region (for example, us-east-2). The URL you need for Tableau is: athena.<AWS-region>.amazonaws.com. For example, athena.us-east-2.amazonaws.com.

  1. Connect Tableau to Athena
    a. Open Tableau, and click Connections.
    b. Next, select Amazon Athena and enter the following information in the page:
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Amazon Athena

  • For the Server, enter: athena.<AWS-region>.amazonaws.com
  • For the S3 Staging Directory, enter: the S3 output URL
  • For the Access Key ID, enter: your AWS username
  • For the Secret Access Key, enter: your AWS password

Common Troubleshooting Issue

  • Issue: When I attempt to connect to Amazon Athena from Tableau, this error occurs:
    An error occurred while communicating with Amazon Athena.
    Bad Connection: Tableau could not connect to the data source.
  • Reason: This error may occur if you did not specify the S3 staging location.
  • Action: Be sure to specify the S3 staging location in both in Tableau and on the Tetra Data Platform (TDP). To check if you specified the S3 staging location, see Get AWS Credentials to Query Athena SQL Tables.

Updated 12 months ago