Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.
Overview
Hightouch lets you pull data stored in Amazon Athena and push it to downstream destinations. Connecting Hightouch to Amazon Athena requires some setup in both platforms. In Amazon, you need to make sure the AWS credentials you will use to connect Hightouch has the correct permissions.
You may need to allowlist Hightouch's IP addresses to let our systems connect to your warehouse. Reference our networking docs to determine which IP addresses you need to allowlist.
Required permissions
The AWS user that you use to connect to Athena must have the following permissions:
Read and list permissions for Athena resources and execute permissions for Athena queries:
ListWorkGroupsListDataCatalogsListDatabasesListTableMetadataStartQueryExecutionGetQueryExecutionGetQueryResultsGetQueryResultsStream
Read and write permissions for the output location in S3 to both write the results to S3 and read them back:
PutObjectListBucketListBucketMultipartUploadsListMultipartUploadPartsGetBucketLocationGetObjectAbortMultipartUploadPutObject
See the AWS managed policy AmazonAthenaFullAccess
for reference.
If you are using Lake Formation for managing permissions you need to grant database permissions to the AWS user that you use to connect to Athena, otherwise no databases load when configuring the source.
Connection configuration
To get started, go to the Sources overview page and click the Add source button. Select Amazon Athena and follow the steps below.
Configure your credentials
You can either select AWS credentials you've previously configured in Hightouch or choose to add New credentials directly from this page.
The credentials must be for a user who has permission to access Athena and the S3 output location. Refer to the required permissions section for permission details and to the AWS credential configuration docs for credential setup information.
Configure your Amazon Athena source
Enter the following fields into Hightouch:
- Athena workgroup you previously set up in AWS.
- (Optional) Query output location—you only need to enter this if your workgroup doesn't have an output location configured. This is an S3 path.
- Data catalog name
- Database name
- (Advanced) VPC connection endpoint-if you wish to connect to Athena through a private VPC endpoint, please contact Hightouch and we can provide the endpoint necessary for this step.
Workgroup and data catalog options populate depending on your AWS credentials. If you don't see the expected values, confirm your AWS credentials and click Refresh. Your database options populate depending on your selected data catalog.
Test your connection
When setting up Amazon Athena as a source for the first time, Hightouch checks that you have the correct permissions. Once the test passes, click Continue to finish setup.
Next steps
Once your source configuration has passed the necessary validation, your source setup is complete. Next, you can set up models to define which data you want to pull from Athena.
The Athena source supports these modeling methods:
- writing a query in the SQL editor
- using the visual table selector
- leveraging existing dbt models
- leveraging existing Looker Looks
Data types
Hightouch parses most Athena data types into JavaScript types before sending them to your destination. Hightouch leaves the following Athena data types as strings:
BIGINTARRAYMAPBINARYSTRUCT
Read more about Athena data types in the Athena documentation.
Tips and troubleshooting
To date, our customers haven't experienced any errors while using this source. If you run into any issues, please don't hesitate to . We're here to help.