Metabase Athena Driver

💥Note: This project is under active development

Build

I'm not familiar enough with lein to know if there is a better way to include a jar from a static URL, so for the time being we download it manually.

1. Download the Athena driver into your local Maven repo

   mkdir -p ~/.m2/repository/athena/athena-jdbc/2.0.7/
   wget -O ~/.m2/repository/athena/athena-jdbc/2.0.7/athena-jdbc-2.0.7.jar https://s3.amazonaws.com/athena-downloads/drivers/JDBC/SimbaAthenaJDBC_2.0.7/AthenaJDBC42_2.0.7.jar 

2. Clone this repo

   git clone https://github.com/dacort/metabase-athena-driver

3. Build the jar

   cd metabase-athena-driver/
   DEBUG=1 LEIN_SNAPSHOTS_IN_RELEASE=true lein uberjar

Running

With Metabase 0.32, drivers must be stored in a plugins directory in the same directory where metabase.jar is, or you can specify the directory by setting the env var MB_PLUGINS_DIR.

Let's assume we download metabase.jar to ~/metabae/ and we built the project above. From the source directory:

TARGET_DIR=~/metabae
mkdir ${TARGET_DIR}/plugins/
cp target/uberjar/athena.metabase-driver.jar ${TARGET_DIR}/plugins/
cd ${TARGET_DIR}/
java -jar metabase.jar

You should see a message on startup similar to:

05-07 23:27:32 INFO plugins.lazy-loaded-driver :: Registering lazy loading driver :athena...
05-07 23:27:32 INFO metabase.driver :: Registered driver :athena (parents: #{:sql-jdbc}) 🚚

Configuring

Once you've started up Metabase, go to add a database and select "Athena".

You'll need to provide the AWS region, an access key and secret key, and an S3 bucket and prefix where query results will be written to.

Note that the initial sync can take some time depending on how many databases and tables you have.

Testing

Only one test exists at the moment, but can easily be run:

lein test

Known Issues

• Cannot specify a single database to sync
• Only native SQL queries are supported
  • Native SQL Queries must not end with a semi-colon (;)
  • Basic aggregations seem to work in the query builder
  • Parameterized queries are not supported
• Sometimes, the initial database verification can time out
  • If this happens, configure a higher timeout value with the MB_DB_CONNECTION_TIMEOUT_MS environment variable
• Heavily nested fields can result in a StackOverflowError
  • If this happens, increase the -Xss JVM parameter