Amazon Athena Connector witouth Gateway

[MLechner]

Hello everyone,
is it really necessary to have a gateway for the Athena Connector in PowerBI ? That makes no sense after all. Why should I load the data from the AWS cloud to a local datagateway to load it back to the cloud ?

Or have I misunderstood something ?

And what is the difference between the Athena Connector and the ODBC Connector. For the Athena Connector I need an ODBC connection. Only that I can then additionally write a query in the ODBC Connector, I can not in the Athena Connector. Why should I then use the Athena Connector at all ?

Greetings
Markus

[MLechner]

Thank you for your answer,

if this is true, the Athena Connector is just a marketing joke, because the ODBC Connector is more powerful.

[ibarrau · Accepted solution]

Hi. Just because Power Bi has a connector it doesn't mean that the connector is a cloud one. For example, the odbc is a connector that needs a windows environment configuration to make a good call. That means it needs the gateway running even if the data is in cloud.

The Athena connector might be built in a similar way. Its code might need a special local evironment and a gateway to make it work. Not all of the connector are cloud. 

I don't think even Microsoft is responsible for building all the connectors. You are working with a different cloud. As far as I can tell, the recommendation for data analysis is building a source of truth in a warehouse environment and not a lake. I'm sure Redshift wouldn't need a gateway for example.

I have worked with Athena in the past. If you want to keep it with that technology, the best way to make it work properly would be creating an EC2 VM in AWS to install the gateway. That way you are not downloading and uploading the data all over again, it is just moved in the same cloud before going to Power Bi.

I hope that make sense and help