So, our movers couldn’t make it to the new house yesterday because their big truck was too massive for the cute little Ballard streets.

So we have a house, and the only thing in it is:

• 1GB CenturyLink fiber connection (w00t!)
• 1 redneck lawn chair abandoned in the back yard by the previous owner

Naturally this is a perfect environment to play with the Tableau 10.3 beta and new Athena connector. My wife was not pleased. She doesn’t understand the greatness that is Athena.

The instructions for setting this sucker up are a touch spotty, so here are some pointers:

Java (and what to do when Tableau can’t find it)

First, you need Java installed since the Athena connector uses AWS’s JDBC driver to connect to Athena. On the first Windows machine I installed to,  Tableau couldn’t find Java, even though the JRE was installed. The Tableau connection dialog actually directed me to the Java homepage where I dutifully re-installed what I already had on my machine. I rebooted just “to be sure”, and tried again. Same warning. I cursed.

By looking at the logs I discovered that Tableau wasn’t seeing the JAVA_HOME system variable on my box and couldn’t find a reference to it in the windows registry. I had to manually add this variable to my machine, pointing to the location of the JRE. If you’ve never done this before yourself, just Google “JAVA_HOME windows” and you’ll find lots of walk-throughs. From what I saw, having JRE_HOME defined will not do the trick.

The Athena JDBC Driver

Strangely, the beta website doesn’t mention you need to download this, and it doesn’t tell you where to put it once you do. In-dialog help points you out to “our” drivers page at tableau.com/drivers, but the Athena driver isn’t there.

Anyway, download the driver from here.

By looking at logs, I could see where Tableau expected this driver to be:

Windows: c:\users\<your username>\Tableau\Drivers (you’ll need to create the \Tableau\Drivers folder yourself)

Mac: /users/<your username>/Library/Tableau/Drivers (you’ll need to create the /Tableau/Drivers directory)

Update from the product team. Use these instead:

On Windows place the Athena JDBC jar in the C:\Program Files\Tableau\Drivers directory.

On Mac, place the Athena JDBC jar in the ~/Library/Tableau/Drivers directory

Take the .jar you downloaded and drop it in one of these two locations. Restart Tableau.

Tableau’s Athena Connection Dialog

After you have everything in place, you need to address the following:

Server: athena.region.amazonaws.com (for example, athena.us-west-2.amazonaws.com

Port: 443

S3 Staging Directory: Find this in Settings in the AWS console for Athena. AWS called this property “Query Result Location”

Username / Password: The Access Key ID and Secret Access Key associated with the IAM user you are logging in as.

Happy Athena-ing!