How to crawl Amazon Athena

Updated August 29, 2023 16:14

Once you have configured the Amazon Athena access permissions, you can establish a connection between Atlan and Amazon Athena.

To crawl metadata from Amazon Athena, complete the following steps.

Select the source

To select Amazon Athena as your source:

In the top right corner of any screen, navigate to New and then click New Workflow.
From the list of packages, select Athena Assets, and click Setup Workflow.

To enter your Amazon Athena credentials:

For Host enter the host for your Amazon Athena instance.
For Authentication choose the method you configured when setting up the Amazon Athena access permissions:
- At the bottom, enter the AWS Role ARN and S3 Output Location you configured. The S3 Output Location is where you store temporary Athena query results.
- For IAM User authentication, enter the AWS Access Key and AWS Secret Key you configured.
- For IAM Role authentication:
  - Leave AWS Role ARN blank to use role-based authentication.
  - To use role delegation-based authentication, set the AWS Role ARN to the ARN of the role you created in your AWS account.
  - To use role delegation-based authentication with an external ID, under External ID click the Generate button. Click the button to the right of this to copy the generated ID and use this in setting up your trust policy.
(Optional) For Workgroup you can override the default primary workgroup for tracking compute costs, granular permission controls, and more.
Click Test Authentication to confirm connectivity to Amazon Athena using these details.
When successful, at the bottom of the screen click Next.

To complete the Amazon Athena connection configuration:

Provide a Connection Name that represents your source environment. For example, you might want to use values like production, development, gold, or analytics.
(Optional) To change the users able to manage this connection, change the users or groups listed under Connection Admins.
🚨 Careful! If you do not specify any user or group, nobody will be able to manage the connection — not even admins.
(Optional) To prevent users from querying any Amazon Athena data, change Allow SQL Query to No.
(Optional) To prevent users from previewing any Amazon Athena data, change Allow Data Preview to No.
At the bottom of the screen, click the Next button to proceed.

Before running the Amazon Athena crawler, you can further configure it.

You can override the defaults for any of these options:

To select the assets you want to include in crawling, click Include Metadata. (This will default to all assets, if none are specified.)
To select the assets you want to exclude from crawling, click Exclude Metadata. (This will default to no assets if none are specified.)
To have the crawler ignore tables and views based on a naming convention, specify a Java regular expression in the Exclude regex for tables & views field.

💪 Did you know? If an asset appears in both the include and exclude filters, the exclude filter takes precedence.

To run the Amazon Athena crawler, after completing the steps above:

To run the crawler once, immediately, at the bottom of the screen click the Run button.
To schedule the crawler to run hourly, daily, weekly or monthly, at the bottom of the screen click the Schedule & Run button.

Once the crawler has completed running, you will see the assets in Atlan's asset page! 🎉