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About the Simba Athena ODBC Driver

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About Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service capable of querying data from Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) using SQL. It is designed for short, interactive queries that are useful for data exploration. Athena enables you to run ad-hoc queries and quickly analyze data that is stored in S3 without ETL processes. Query results are stored in an S3 bucket and made available for analysis in BI tools. The data formats that Athena supports include CSV, JSON, Parquet, Avro, and ORC. Unlike traditional RDBMS or SQL-on-Hadoop solutions that require centralized schema definitions, Athena can query self-describing data as well as complex or multi-structured data that is commonly seen in big data systems. Moreover, Athena does not require a fully structured schema and can support semi-structured or nested data types such as JSON. Amazon Athena processes the data in record batches and discovers the schema during the processing of each record batch. Thus, Athena has the capability to support changing schemas over the lifetime of a query. Athena reconfigures its operators and handles these situations to ensure that data is not lost.
Note:
  • Access from Athena to your S3 data store is configured through Amazon Web Services (AWS). For information about enabling Athena to access S3 data stores, see the Amazon Athena documentation: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/what-is.html.
  • When using Athena, you are charged for each query that you run. The amount that you are charged is based on the amount of data scanned by the query. For more information, see Amazon Athena Pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/athena/pricing/.

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About the Connector

The Simba Athena ODBC Driver enables organizations to connect their BI tools to the Amazon Athena query service, enabling Business Intelligence, analytics, and reporting on the data that Athena returns from Amazon S3 databases. The connector retrieves catalog metadata from the AthenaAPI. The connector complies with the ODBC 3.80 data standard, including important functionality such as Unicode and 32- and 64-bit support for high-performance computing environments on all platforms. ODBC is one of the most established and widely supported APIs for connecting to and working with databases. At the heart of the technology is the ODBC connector, which connects an application to the database. For more information about ODBC, see Data Access Standards on the Simba Technologies website: https://www.simba.com/resources/data-access-standards-glossary. For complete information about the ODBC specification, see the ODBC API Reference from the Microsoft documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/odbc/reference/syntax/odbc-api-reference. The Simba Athena ODBC Driver is tested on the following data sources:
  • AWS Glue Data Catalog (default)
  • Apache Hive metastore
The Simba Athena ODBC Driver with SQL Connector Installation and Configuration Guide is suitable for users who are looking to access data returned by the Athena query service from their desktop environment. Application developers may also find the information helpful. Refer to your application for details on connecting via ODBC.
Note:For information about how to use the connector in various BI tools, see the Simba ODBC Connectors Quick Start Guide for Windows: http://cdn.simba.com/docs/ODBC_QuickstartGuide/content/quick_start/intro.htm.