How to crawl Amazon Athena

Once you have configured the Amazon Athena access permissions, you can establish a connection between Atlan and Amazon Athena. (If you are also using a private network for Amazon Athena, you will need to set that up first, too.)

To crawl metadata from Amazon Athena, review the order of operations and then complete the following steps.

Select the source

To select Amazon Athena as your source:

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

Provide credentials

To enter your Amazon Athena credentials:

1. For Host enter the host name (or PrivateLink endpoint) for your Amazon Athena instance.
2. 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, enter the following:
     • Set the AWS Role ARN to the ARN of the role you created in your AWS account.
     • (Optional) Under External ID, click the Generate button. Click the button to the right of this field to copy the generated ID and use it in setting up your trust policy.
3. (Optional) For Workgroup, you can override the default primary workgroup for tracking compute costs, granular permission controls, and more.
4. Click Test Authentication to confirm connectivity to Amazon Athena.
5. Once successful, at the bottom of the screen, click Next.

Configure the connection

To complete the Amazon Athena connection configuration:

1. Provide a Connection Name that represents your source environment. For example, you might want to use values like production, development, gold, or analytics.
2. (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.
3. (Optional) To prevent users from querying any Amazon Athena data, change Allow SQL Query to No.
4. (Optional) To prevent users from previewing any Amazon Athena data, change Allow Data Preview to No.
5. At the bottom of the screen, click the Next button to proceed.

Configure the crawler

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.
• For Advanced Config, keep Default for the default configuration or click Custom to configure the crawler:
  • For Use JDBC Internal Methods, click True to enable JDBC internal methods for data extraction or click False to disable it.
  • For Enable Source Level Filtering, click True to enable schema-level filtering at source or click False to disable it.

Run the crawler

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! 🎉