Since my last post I have still been hard at work! At work I have been working on establishing a connection with Microsoft Power BI and AWS Redshift. This should be a simple task for Microsoft Power BI comes with built in capabilities to connect to AWS Redshift via Open Database Connectivity (ODBC). But my job wants this connection to be done via Java Database Connectivity (JDBC). The kicker is Microsoft Power BI does not natively support JDBC…
The reason we are wanting to utilize JDBC over ODBC is that we are making a custom configuration to use our user management system to have users login and be granted access to their data. So I have been spending the past couple of days researching and testing out various ODBC-JDBC Bridges. This has been tricky for I have been having to deal with obtaining trial license to evaluate if the bridges are viable for our project.
The first bridge that I stumbled upon seemed very promising. But their pricing was much larger than other options that are available. The next bridge that I found went by the name of ZappySys, it was the easiest to get set up and functioning. The issue with ZappySys though was that even though it would connect to our Redshift cluster it was throwing errors when attempting to read data from the database. It did not query data correctly out of the box and required the user to supply the query statements in order to read data. This would become an inconvenience for our users. I communicated this error back with their support who was extremely helpful but were not able to resolve the issue.
The last bridge that I tried was provided by the company Easysoft. Their ODBC-JDBC Gateway was a little more involved in getting set up than ZappySys and retrieving a trial license took time to receive. But upon completion of all of these things I was able to get Easysoft set up and established a bridge that could be utilized by Microsoft Power BI. Their was no need to input queries for it synced perfectly with Microsoft Power BI.
This connection was done using the AWS Redshift JDBC driver and now that I have successfully completed a connection with a bridge the next step will be to move on to helping configure the customized Redshift driver in Java which I have never used before…
Wish me luck!