Interacting With Amazon Athena from R

This is a short post for those looking to test out Amazon Athena with R.

Amazon makes Athena available via JDBC, so you can use RJDBC to query data. All you need is their JAR file and some setup information. Here’s how to get the JAR file to the current working directory:

URL <- 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/athena-downloads/drivers/AthenaJDBC41-1.0.0.jar'
fil <- basename(URL)
if (!file.exists(fil)) download.file(URL, fil)

To avoid putting credentials in code, you can store the AWS key and secret you’re using for the queries in ATHENA_USER and ATHENA_PASSWORD environment variables via ~/.Renviron. You’ll also need an S3 bucket writable by those credentials for the Athena staging directory. With that info in hand, it’s easy to connect:

library(RJDBC)
library(dplyr)

drv <- JDBC(driverClass="com.amazonaws.athena.jdbc.AthenaDriver", fil, identifier.quote="'")

con <- jdbcConnection <- dbConnect(drv, 'jdbc:awsathena://athena.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:443/',
                                   s3_staging_dir="s3://accessible-bucket",
                                   user=Sys.getenv("ATHENA_USER"),
                                   password=Sys.getenv("ATHENA_PASSWORD"))

Even if you have no data configured in Athena, you can check out the test data available to all:

dbListTables(con)
## [1] "elb_logs"

If that worked, then you should be able to query data (using the fully qualified table name in this case):

dbGetQuery(con, "SELECT * FROM sampledb.elb_logs LIMIT 10") %>% 
  dplyr::glimpse()
## Observations: 10
## Variables: 16
## $ timestamp             <chr> "2014-09-27T00:00:25.424956Z", "2014-09-27T00:00:56.439218Z", "2014-09-27T00:01:27.441734Z", "2014-09-27T00:01:58.366715Z", "2014-09-27T00:02:29.446363Z", "2014-09-2...
## $ elbname               <chr> "lb-demo", "lb-demo", "lb-demo", "lb-demo", "lb-demo", "lb-demo", "lb-demo", "lb-demo", "lb-demo", "lb-demo"
## $ requestip             <chr> "241.230.198.83", "252.26.60.51", "250.244.20.109", "247.59.58.167", "254.64.224.54", "245.195.140.77", "245.195.140.77", "243.71.49.173", "240.139.5.14", "251.192.4...
## $ requestport           <dbl> 27026, 27026, 27026, 27026, 27026, 27026, 27026, 27026, 27026, 27026
## $ backendip             <chr> "251.192.40.76", "249.89.116.3", "251.111.156.171", "251.139.91.156", "251.111.156.171", "254.64.224.54", "254.64.224.54", "250.244.20.109", "247.65.176.249", "250.2...
## $ backendport           <dbl> 443, 8888, 8888, 8888, 8000, 8888, 8888, 8888, 8888, 8888
## $ requestprocessingtime <dbl> 9.1e-05, 9.4e-05, 8.4e-05, 9.7e-05, 9.1e-05, 9.3e-05, 9.4e-05, 8.3e-05, 9.0e-05, 9.0e-05
## $ backendprocessingtime <dbl> 0.046598, 0.038973, 0.047054, 0.039845, 0.061461, 0.037791, 0.047035, 0.048792, 0.045724, 0.029918
## $ clientresponsetime    <dbl> 4.9e-05, 4.7e-05, 4.9e-05, 4.9e-05, 4.0e-05, 7.7e-05, 7.5e-05, 7.3e-05, 4.0e-05, 6.7e-05
## $ elbresponsecode       <chr> "200", "200", "200", "200", "200", "200", "200", "200", "200", "200"
## $ backendresponsecode   <chr> "200", "200", "200", "200", "200", "400", "400", "200", "200", "200"
## $ receivedbytes         <dbl> 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
## $ sentbytes             <dbl> 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2
## $ requestverb           <chr> "GET", "GET", "GET", "GET", "GET", "GET", "GET", "GET", "GET", "GET"
## $ url                   <chr> "http://www.abcxyz.com:80/jobbrowser/?format=json&state=running&user=20g578y", "http://www.abcxyz.com:80/jobbrowser/?format=json&state=running&user=20g578y", "http:/...
## $ protocol              <chr> "HTTP/1.1", "HTTP/1.1", "HTTP/1.1", "HTTP/1.1", "HTTP/1.1", "HTTP/1.1", "HTTP/1.1", "HTTP/1.1", "HTTP/1.1", "HTTP/1.1"

And, you can disconnect when done:

dbDisconnect(con)

You should probably store the JAR file in a central location and refer to it that way in “production” scripts.

Now, you can go crazy querying data and racking up AWS charges ?.

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9 Comments Interacting With Amazon Athena from R

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  3. Mike

    This looks awesome! However, I am getting an error when running this step:

    drv <- JDBC(driverClass=”com.amazonaws.athena.jdbc.AthenaDriver”, fil, identifier.quote=”‘”)

    Error in .jfindClass(as.character(driverClass)[1]) : class not found

    I have fil in the working directory. Any clue if there are extra dependencies I need?

    Reply
    1. hrbrmstr

      Hey Michael. I saw your SO post as well. This error is 99.99% certain to be that the jar file is not found where you’re saying fil is. The RJDBC examples show that it has to be a path variable sufficient to get it to it’s destination.

      Reply
      1. Shlomit

        Hey, I’m getting the same error. The fil equal to the written above
        “URL <- ‘https://s3.amazonaws.com/athena-downloads/drivers/AthenaJDBC41-1.0.0.jar’
        fil <- basename(URL)
        if (!file.exists(fil)) download.file(URL, fil)”
        and it is on the same current working directory.

        Reply
        1. renaud

          I got the same issue because I was using java 7 while Athena JDBC seems to work only with java 8. So check your java version just in case.

          Reply
    2. Christopher Crosbie

      I was getting this same error which was being caused by not having R configured to look at version 8. I was able to fix the error by running the following from a command line:

      export JAVAHOME=”/usr/libexec/javahome -v 1.8″
      export LDLIBRARYPATH=$JAVAHOME/jre/lib/server
      sudo R CMD javareconf -n
      sudo ln -f -s $(/usr/libexec/java
      home)/jre/lib/server/libjvm.dylib /usr/local/lib

      Reply
  4. gina

    For me the issue was the downloaded file was not in binary format. Adding mode=”wb” to the download statement fixed it.
    download.file(URL, fil, mode=”wb”)

    Reply

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