The MapR Drill ODBC driver provides BI tools access to Drill’s flexible query capabilities so that users can quickly explore various data sources. The MapR Drill ODBC driver includes Drill Explorer, which is a simple user interface that enables users to examine the content of data sources and create views before visualizing the data in a BI tool.
Once you install the MapR Drill ODBC Driver, you can create ODBC DSNs to Drill data sources using the ODBC Administrator tool and then use the DSNs to access the data from BI tools that work with ODBC. Drill can connect to data with well-defined schemas, such as Hive. Drill can also connect directly to data that is self-describing, such as HBase, Parquet, JSON, CSV, and TSV.
Complete the following steps to connect to a Drill data source from a BI tool using ODBC:
For examples of how you can use the MapR Drill ODBC Driver to connect to Drill Data Sources from BI tools, see Step 3. Connect to Drill Data Sources from a BI Tool. While the documentation includes examples for Tableau, you can use this driver with any BI tool that works with ODBC, such as Excel, MicroStrategy, and Toad.
The following figure shows how a BI tool on Windows uses an ODBC connection to access data from a Hive table:
The following components provide applications access to Drill data sources:
| Component | Role |
|---|---|
| Drillbit | Accepts queries from clients, executes queries against Drill data sources, and returns the query results. |
| ODBC Data Source Administrator | The ODBC Data Source Administrator enables the creation of DSNs to Apache Drill data sources. In the figure above, the ODBC Data Source Administrator was used to create Hive-DrillDataSources. |
| ODBC DSN | Provides applications information about how to connect to the Drill Source. In the figure above, theHive-DrillDataSources is a DSN that provides connection information to the Hive tables. |
| BI Tool | Accesses Drill data sources using the connection information from the ODBC DSN. In the figure above, the BI tool usesHive-DrillDataSources to access the hive_student table. |
