Anyone have experience reading data from aws S3 into Tableau / athena?

Questions & Help
1

anyone <!here> have experience reading data from aws S3 into Tableau / athena?

@Ram_Ganeshan_College_of_William_and_Mary

https://safegraphcovid19.slack.com/archives/C0109NPA543/p1586906713242500

2

the datasets aren’t that large so Athena might not be your best bet. But I think the first step might be to transfer S3 data into your own account and then create your Athena tables. Have you worked with Athena DDL before?

AWS has another service called, I think, Glue. Glue can parse the JSON files and autocreate schema for Athena but it takes some finangling

3

someone else may comment on the exact data size, not at my computer, but for example it easily fits and queryable on my desktop. So you could put it in SQLite or another format Tableau supports

4

I don’t have any experience with Tableau specifically, but if you want more pointers on how to setup Athena feel free to ask me more

5

Thanks, Nick. I was looking to quickly get data so I can visualize/explore. I figured Tableau would read from aws as transparently as it does from excel/csv. What I am hearing is that it is just as easy to download and then read it into Tableau. I am attaching the interface. We just need a server name. Staging directories I assume are where the different datasets are.

6

safegraph doesn’t offer Athena, so you’d have to set that up on your own. But it looks like you can connect to JSON files (looking at the options on your screenshot)

7

there’s instructions around here how to download the files from S3. they are all JSON or CSV, so maybe able to read them directly into your tool

8

Thanks. Thats the way to do it.

9

@Nick_Connor - did your team end up using AWS Glue at all? we have another team who was interested in leveraging if you had anything pre-made!