How to connect to Azure HDInsight from your Datazen server using ODBC

Happy Mother’s Day!

As with our previous post on connecting to SAP HANA, this is another easy one to knock out just by pulling together some previous posts from this blog and from Microsoft.

First, make sure you’ve followed the instructions in my post to setup your own Datazen server.

Second, make sure you follow my instructions to setup a custom ODBC provider on your Datazen server.

Third, spin up your own HDInsight cluster in Microsoft Azure.

Now, follow these instructions to install and configure the Microsoft Hive ODBC driver on your Datazen server, just like you did for your SAP HANA connection.

Once that’s done, you can follow the same steps you did to setup the other data source on the Datazen server admin portal –

Under the BI hub you want to setup the HDInsight connection, select the Data Sources option.

Choose the custom ODBC provider you setup in my previous post so you can pass the username/password in the connection string to the HDInsight cluster.

Test the connection – you should get a success message if you connected properly.

Great – you’ve finished setting up your connection to HDInsight.  Now you can write a sample query against it and make sure it brings back data.  Click on the name of your data connection to go to the Data View screen

Now click the “New Data View” button to create a new view of your Hive data.  Give it a name, leave the “Allow Client Data Caching” box checked if you want to make sure folks can use the dashboards while offline, and choose a refresh frequency.  Then write your query to be used against HDInsight and hit Next –

Success!  I wrote my query properly, and now have this data view available for the dashboards I want to build in my Datazen Publisher App.

Thanks to the custom ODBC provider, adding new data sources from many different data sources becomes child’s play.

One final note – There’s a great blog post on how to setup ADFS for Datazen you can read here.  It’s really well done, and I highly recommend taking the time to step through it.

Thanks!