How to crawl Amazon Redshift

Updated July 13, 2023 19:22

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

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

Select the source

To select Amazon Redshift 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 Redshift Assets, and click Setup Workflow.

To enter your Amazon Redshift credentials:

For Host Name enter the host name of your Amazon Redshift instance. From your Redshift cluster you can find the host name in the Configuration section as a variable called Endpoint.
For Port enter the port number for your Amazon Redshift instance. You can find this next to the host name in the Configuration section of your Redshift cluster.
For Authentication choose the method you configured when setting up the Amazon Redshift access permissions:
- For Basic authentication, enter the Username and Password you configured. Also enter the name of the Database to crawl.
- For IAM User authentication, enter the AWS Access Key, AWS Secret Key, and Username you configured for the database. If you are accessing a private cluster, also enter the Cluster ID. Finally, enter the name of the Database to crawl.
- For IAM Role authentication, enter the Username you configured for the database. To use role delegation-based authentication set the AWS Role ARN to the ARN of the role you created in your AWS account. (Leave AWS Role ARN blank to use role-based authentication.) If you are accessing a private cluster, also enter the Cluster ID. Finally, enter the name of the Database to crawl.
Click Test Authentication to confirm connectivity to Amazon Redshift using these details.
When successful, at the bottom of the screen click Next.

To complete the Amazon Redshift 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 Redshift data, change Allow SQL Query to No.
(Optional) To prevent users from previewing any Amazon Redshift data, change Allow Data Preview to No.
At the bottom of the screen, click the Next button to proceed.

Before running the Amazon Redshift 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 regular expression in the Exclude regex for tables & views field.
(Optional) For Advanced Config, keep Default for the default configuration or click Advanced to configure the crawler:
- For Cross Connection, click Yes to extract lineage across all available data source connections or click No to only extract lineage from Amazon Redshift.
- For Control Config, if Atlan support has provided you with a custom control configuration, select Custom and enter the configuration into the Custom Config box.

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

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

To check for any permissions or other configuration issues before running the crawler, click Preflight checks.
You can either:
- 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! 🎉